


Vanity project.

by orphan_account



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: "Lance can you not quote memes while we're inches from death please.", "Make good choices kids!", "Maybe the real defenders of the universe were all the friends we made along the way.", "My abandonment issues have abandonment issues.", Anxiety, Canon ethnicities, Enemies to Friends, Female Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, Galra Keith (Voltron), Gen, Lotor is horrified by everything humans do, Multi Universe, Platonic Relationships, Post-Season/Series 04, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Some time-travel, The generals, There's a Kuro and a Shiro, Trans Keith (Voltron), dads of marmora, magic Allura
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-16
Updated: 2018-05-01
Packaged: 2019-01-18 05:35:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 17
Words: 72,675
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12381957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: "I am not here for revenge. I am not here for redemption. I am here because it is convenient to my survival."Up on the bridge, Hunk nudges Pidge with his elbow and mumbles "Redemption arc."Lotor, outlaw prince and erstwhile prisoner in the Paladins' laundry room, has defected to Voltron. With the fate of the multi-verse hanging in the balance and enemy forces amassing Voltron has to take any help it can get, even if the one offering it did try to kill them on seventeen separate occasions. As a war of apocalyptic proportions unfolds, Lotor finds something he has never had before: a family. Just in time to have it all torn away.





	1. Laundry room

Lotor asks for a chat. What he gets is an improvised cell in the laundry room because the castle did not come equipped with any proper holding cells, largely because the original pilots of the Altean war-castle assumed they were going to kill everyone, rather than take a Galra prince on-board for negotiations. It was either this or punting Lotor into one of the disused quarters or numerous broom closets, and nobody wanted to leave Lotor alone with anything he might be able to turn into a weapon. Unaware or unperturbed that he is being watched through the security feed, Lotor sits on top of the washing machine Hunk built and examines the quicks of his nails, making occasional grooming adjustments with the tips of some very sharp teeth.   
Of course, he was thoroughly searched and disarmed before they let him anywhere near the castle. At Allura’s behest the rebels emptied out a ship where Lotor docked his escape vehicle, then was met by Kolivan and Keith. Even with his Marmora mask in place, Lotor guessed it was one of the Paladins of Voltron underneath the helmet as Keith patted him down.

“Those are some stubby little fingers for a Galra.” Lotor noted as Keith took a concealed knife from his collar, and an instrument not unlike a sewing needle that had been concealed in his hair “Is it the Black Paladin in there? I mean the newer one, not the Champion.”

“If you open your mouth one more time before we get to the castle, I’ll feed you your teeth.”

Lotor smiled indulgently and kept his mouth shut. He was unloaded, disarmed and scanned for fuses or bombs hiding in his tissues, and delivered to the Paladins with his hands bound behind his back. Lotor was steered into the main hall of the castle and stayed there, still silent, long enough to catch a glimpse of the bridge before he was swiftly conducted to the laundry room.

Keith stopped in front of the thick door to unbind Lotor’s hands.

“Well, may I speak now?”

“No.” snapped Keith.

“Considering I did just save you from having to follow that grand old Marmora tradition of pointless self-sacrifice, don’t you think you’re speaking to me a bit rudely?”

Kolivan made a swing for him, but Lotor dodged expertly and stepped backwards into the laundry room. He popped the door shut and rapped on the other side “I hope you’re going to lock the door. I won’t be quite so useful to Voltron if your friend snaps me in half over his knee.”

“You better get all that sass out now,” said Keith through a gritted jaw “’Cos if you bring that shit in front of the Paladins, you will get hurt.”

“Alright, alright, fair enough.”  
Then he hopped up onto the washing machine where he has been ever since.

“I don’t trust him.” says Hunk.

The Paladins, Kolivan and Matt have gathered on the bridge to decide what to do. The security feed in the laundry room (which they found necessary to install after Lance got himself locked in there and his cries for help went unnoticed for the entire night) takes up the centre of the screen, flanked by rolling columns of text as the rebel leaders report in their successes. Coran scrolls through these perfunctorily. His eyes keep drifting back to the security feed, looking at Lotor in a dark and mistrustful in a way that Coran normally reserves for times when he thinks one of the Paladins may have finished his left-overs and is refusing to own up. The new crisis has given Allura a fresh burst of energy. Even though she was semi-cooked by a blast of magic energy only half an hour ago, she’s turning agitated circles and buzzing with a nervous energy. Lance sticks close to her as if he expects her legs to give out at any moment. Keith is exhausted and a little bit frightened at himself- as far as he knows, the only person in the room who knows about his near-death experience is Matt. He does not relish the task of telling the others what he almost did. Apart from Keith, leaning heavily on Shiro, and Allura, who paces not unlike Blue will when she is perturbed, the rest of them are standing still, trying to process the fact that the Galra prince is sitting on the castle’s washing machine.

“Of course you don’t trust him.” says Shiro “Even if you weren’t one of the most suspicious people in the universe, that’s the Galra prince in there.”

“I know, but I super don’t trust him. I’m getting such bad vibes off of him.” insists Hunk “You know when you’re trapped in a room with a wasp? There are two ways it can go, if you’re like me and fatally allergic to bees, which is either you kill the wasp or the wasp kills you, and ‘cos wasps are aggressive quiznakkers there’s no way there won’t be some kind of confrontation. You following me?”

“You’re allergic to wasps?” asks Pidge.

“Oh, yeah, super fucking allergic. I’ve only been stung by one once since we figured out I was allergic and I was in hospitals for…” he glances over at Lance “What was it, a week?”

“Nine days. He was on a ventilator for the first two.”

“This is all very interesting, but we have a more pressing matter at hand! What does he want?” Allura stops so suddenly in front of the screen that Lance bumps into her.

“To infiltrate.” says Kolivan.

“To destroy us from the inside!” adds Allura, pounding a fist into her palm.

Keith stares at the screen, as if the sheer pressure of his eyes on Lotor through a security feed will force the prince to surrender his secrets “But we scanned him on the ship. He hasn’t got a bomb hiding in his freaky third lung or anything.”

Kolivan cuffs Keith on the back of the head “I would like to point out you have a third lung as well. I’ll thank you not to insult our physiology, kitten.” 

Lotor makes a sudden movement. Everyone startles. Shiro’s mechanical hand crackles white dangerously close to Keith’s face and Pidge’s starts towards the hall with her bayard at the ready.

“What’s he doing?” whispers Matt.

Lotor’s face folds into a well-worn scowl. He glowers at his own feet for a second, then repeats his sudden gesture from a moment before. This time, because they are all watching in a rapt silence, they hear the tiny squeak of a sneeze that accompanies the violent jerking of his head.

“Oh for the love of the ancients! He’s got us jumping over sneezes now.” Coran throws his hands up in frustration “Right, that’s it! We’re interrogating the little shit right this instant. He’s our prisoner, after all, so why should we be afraid of what he’s going to do? He’s locked in our laundry room, for crying out loud.”

At this moment, Lotor spots a hamper of freshly folded laundry that has not yet been sorted out amongst the Paladins on one of the shelves. He selects the topmost item to investigate.

“Hey!” forgetting himself, Keith jams the intercoms on and shouts “That’s my binder! Put that down!”

Lotor jumps “What the- are you watching me through the door?”

“I don’t have to answer that! Put that back where you found it.”

“What kind of armour is this? This feels laser-proof.” Lotor plucks a strap experimentally and appears pleased with the resistance 

“You better hope your face is laser-proof!”

Shiro hustles his brother off the coms “We’re coming down now. You’re to stand up with your hands behind your head when the door opens and face one of us. If at any point you try to turn your back, I’ll shock you. If you make any sudden movements, same deal. If you attack any one of us, we’ll just toss you into an airlock and let the vacuum of space deal with you.”

It is decided that Kolivan, Shiro and Allura should be the first to interrogate Lotor. Should he be preparing some kind of subterfuge in the laundry room it is better that he not see any fresh faces- Allura he already knows, from childhood, and Shiro’s face should ring a bell because his battles as Champion were broadcast the length and width of the universe. Kolivan wears his mask to protect his identity, as does Keith, who will not suffer to be left out of the confrontation. He is also eager to get his binder out of harm’s way.   
Coran has to be convinced to stay up in the bridge to steer the castle, in case something goes wrong. He is almost more eager than Keith to get into Lotor’s grille and figure out what he is up to. The only reason he doesn’t charge down there is because Lance asks him to stay.

“I cannot believe this bastard. We spend months chasing his sorry ass through space and suddenly he turns up and says he wants to parlay? The fuck he does. If he tries anything- if he says anything, I’m gonna shove his head in the washing machine and turn it on.”

Allura rolls her eyes “Good to hear that sort of talk again. I’ve missed your temper.”

“The idea that you could miss that.” mutters Kolivan.

On the way over, they decide it is best to open the door quickly, to catch Lotor off-guard if they can. He should be painfully aware that he has been taken prisoner, not the other way around, and he should know exactly who is in charge.   
Allura basically kicks the door in. Lotor has already assumed the position Shiro instructed him to. He is not at all startled by the door banging off its hinges, but the sight of Allura nearly knocks him over.

His mouth drops open. Allura, resplendent in her armour and stylishly bruised from battle, fills up the doorframe, so the other three are left to peer around her broad shoulders. She puts her hands on her hips and glares at Lotor. It has been ten thousand years since the two faced each other without the screen of lions or helmets, and several more since they had spoken. She cannot be sure that Lotor knew it was her under that mask, nor can he be sure that she knew the Lotor everyone spoke of was the same she had known as a child, rather than some other, more promising heir that had claimed the name as well as the prince-hood.   
There is no confusion now. This is Lotor An-Honerva in the laundry room and this is Allura En-Alfor staring him down.

“Hello Lotor. Still over-sized for your age, aren’t you?”

Lotor recovers himself, aware of their audience “Allura! You still look like the impacted back-end of a Weblum.”

A brief scuffle over the coms as several people try to hold Coran off the microphone, then Coran shouts “Don’t you talk to her like that!”

“Holy ancients, that can’t be Coran!” he looks to Allura with something like genuine excitement “Are you serious? You’re still letting your nanny follow you around after all these years?”

Another scuffle. Coran is significantly further from the microphone this time, having to shout, which suggests one of the Paladins may still be trying to push him back “I was an advisor, young man, I will have you know, and an accomplished warrior! I’ll be glad to demonstrate on your face-”

“Shush!” that’s Lance who, from the sound of it, has tackled Coran away from the microphone and is attempting to sit on him to keep him from going back.

Shiro steps in to re-establish order “I hope you have a good reason for throwing yourself on our mercy. You know we aren’t kind to our enemies.”

“Or terribly cruel. You’re just in the middle. Moderate, which is a good strategy.”

“No need to wax poetic Lotor,” Allura crosses her arms “Just tell us what you want.”

“What I want? To help, of course. Ultimately to take down Zarkon.”

A moment of stunned silence follows. Allura and Shiro exchange a significant look. Keith balls his hands up into fists at Lotor’s nerve, after all he has done to them, he comes out of nowhere and expects to be allowed to join the team? Honestly Keith would rather eat his own mask than spend more than one night with Lotor on the castle, but all the same, he squeezes into the room, in between Shiro and Allura, and gives Lotor a stern look.  
“Alright.”

Lotor cocks an eyebrow “Really?”  
At around the same time Pidge shrieks into the intercoms “FUCKING REALLY?” and Coran makes a noise not unlike a wildebeest getting ready to charge.

“Under some strict conditions.” says Keith through gritted teeth. He can feel his brother’s eyes boring into him, and could practically hear the crack of Allura’s jaw when her mouth fell open. Kolivan, for his part, probably just wants to throttle him. “First, I want to know what your specific reason for coming here is. Second, you’re going to tell us everything you know about the empire, including your own illicit project. About Zarkon, the rest of the cannons, that junk stashed in the ruins of Old Daibazaal. Everything. If you lie, I will know.”

“Oh, will you?”

Keith returns Lotor’s cock-sure smile with a cruel little smirk of his own “I’m good at figuring out when someone is bull-shitting me. You following me so far?”  
God, he hopes that sounded convincing. 

“You want to know everything I know truthfully, including no lies of omission.”

“Good. Of course you’re not gonna be staying in the castle.”

“Of course not.”

“And we’re not going to let anyone know you’re here.”

“No. They’d want my blood, even though I’ve spilt very little of theirs.”

Allura starts forwards, but Keith stops her with his shoulder. “And you won’t ever be left unattended. You’re going to be under constant scrutiny for the time you spent here. That might be the rest of your life, you know. We’re not going to let you see much. But what you do see, on accident, on purpose, and what you hear us talk about? Not a bit of it can get back to Zarkon. We’re only going to tolerate you as long as you are useful. If your usefulness is over-taken by how much trouble you’re causing us, which should be none, then we’ll stick you in an airlock and chalk it up to experience. Understand?”

“Sure. I don’t know what chalk means, but it sounds like a fair deal.” Lotor becomes interested in his nails again and begins to buff a scrape away with the pad of his thumb “I plan to cooperate with you, so long as you don’t mistreat me too terribly. I’ve no particular love for the empire. Nor do I cherish any particular hate for Voltron. I want to make that abundantly clear. I am not here for revenge. I am not here for redemption. I am here because it is convenient to my survival, just as the dissolution of Zarkon’s power is. That is the extent of my agenda.”

“Let’s hope so.” Keith backs Allura and Shiro out of the room and slams the door on Lotor’s smug smile.

“Keith.” Shiro spins him around by the shoulders. The look of deadly calm on his face is something Keith has only seen once before, the time Keith had accidentally left his knife laying around and Shiro had somehow ended up impaling his hand on it. It’s as if they are there again, four years younger, Shiro’s hair still all black so it makes him the blood all the redder as it flows from his pierced hand, and Keith, frozen in horror because he is still unaccustomed to the sight of such large amounts of blood. “You know I love you, but you know what you just did?”

Allura puts her face in her hands “I can’t believe it’s really him. Actual quiznakking Lotor. He’s supposed to be dead.”

“You just made my headache into a full-blown head-storm. I will never sleep well again.” Shiro lets go of his shoulder and gets down on his knees, then stretches himself out, face-down on the floor. His next words are slightly muffled as his face is mushed into the tile “I’m just going to stay here for a while. You guys do what you need to do. Work around me. I’m just going to process what the fuck has happened, alright?”

Kolivan cannot think of anything to say. He just stares at Keith, as if he is not sure his little apprentice is even a corporeal thing. 

Keith takes a deep breath and tells himself it will be alright. Then, out loud, he says “It’s alright guys. I know what I’m doing.”

Up on the bridge, Hunk nudges Pidge with his elbow and mumbles "Redemption arc."


	2. The sister generals

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Inter-alien racism. Species-ism?  
> Also toying around the timeline of Voltron (because what even is the timeline in the Voltron canon has it been two months or six months or like eight weeks, we just don't know, people). Currently working off the idea that a decaphoeb is actually 0.35 of an earth year to give us a timeline that's less crazy to work with, so rather than 10,000 actual human years of Galra rule, we're looking at 3500 years of rule. If anyone spots an error in my calculations at any point, please don't hesitate to call me out. I am an Arts and History student. Trying to do math for me is like trying to grate cheese with a blunt spoon. It's just weird and awkward and clearly shouldn't be happening.

It is always hard to know how to unwind after a battle. Especially one so large and devastating as the one Voltron just survived. It was one of those crisis moments of rare intensity which only come along every couple of months, when Zarkon is spurred into action by the machinations of Haggar or other agents of the empire, and unleashes hell with his armadas and some new kind of super-weapon. They always scrape through, somehow, but with the feeling that the traps and trials have torn more away from Voltron than they managed to salvage in the end.  
Allura was shocked with some millions of volts of magical energy. Granted, she shared the brunt of it because the team’s solution was to just grab Allura and hope it’d stop. Coran is still drained from the emotional turmoil of being stuck on the other side of the galaxy while the team were seconds from sudden, explosive death- and this was all before the double-whammy of Lotor first appearing on his ship, then the ad-hoc leader of Voltron allowing Lotor to stay in the official leader’s face without first consulting him. Pidge’s hands won’t stop shaking. Hunk is getting vertigo simply from standing up, so he participates in the discussion of what to do with Lotor star-fished on the ground while he digests the stress and fear of the last day. Lance, for reasons no one is quite sure of, is unusually terse and quiet. He makes no attempts to lighten the mood. Instead, he stays at Allura’s shoulder and mumbles when addressed, meeting no one’s eyes. 

Kolivan has the spotlight right now. Though he speaks calmly and evenly, he cannot pretend to be comfortable with the atmosphere in the room “The easiest thing to do for now will be relocating him to one of our bases. Where he’ll go depends on where Voltron plans to be in the coming weeks.”

He looks to Shiro for clarification, who can only shrug “Couldn’t tell you. We’re normally pretty mobile. We’ll have to be even more mobile in the next couple of weeks, I think, defusing the rest of the heximite bombs.”

“You guys can teludav to us if we need you, right?” says Keith.

“’Us’?” echoes Lance “So you’re not coming back.”

Keith doesn’t meet his eyes “I don’t think I need to.”

“Apparently you don’t.”

Hunk clears his throat “I’m with Keith. I mean, as much as I’d love to have our resident brooder back in the bosom of the castle, there’s no one else we can really trust with Lotor.”

“You could trust me with Lotor.” offers Matt with a sunny smile “I can handle him. I have God and anime on my side.”

“That doesn’t make any sense! Matt, you’re not gonna go camping with our worst enemy.” Pidge casts a quick look at Keith for support.

“It’s fine, Matt. I’ll guard him. Pidge would turn salty if we took you away so soon after she got you back.”

Matt’s face falls: he hadn’t thought of that. 

“It’s not just an issue of trust. There’s a huge risk here. Lotor could escape, or kill someone, or turn out to be a bomb in a really convincing disguise. Kolivan and I will take him somewhere isolated where the damage he can cause is minimal. There’s plenty of moons where we could stick him in an old Marmora base.”

“So you’re gonna hunker down with Mr Chaotic Neutral on some abandoned moon all on your lonesome? I don’t see how that can go wrong.” Lance smiles in the way he only smiles when he is trying to keep himself from hitting someone.

“Lance.” say Shiro and Hunk in unison.

“What? Do you think it sounds like a good idea?”

Kolivan steps in to Keith’s defence “This situation is far from ideal, Lance, but we’re going to have to make it work.”

Lance fixes him with a cool stare “You know, my papi once said the same thing to me when we found out the only IHOP in our town was closing.”

“I don’t know what that is, but your father sounds like a smart man. I will accompany Keith. We’ll go somewhere isolated. Lotor will have only us for company. That, combined with the turmoil he must be feeling at being declared an outlaw in his own empire, that is sure to drive him to the breaking point quickly. He’ll reveal himself soon enough.”

Keith’s stomach clenches. Oh, God, there’s something he hadn’t thought of. Trapped on a remote moon in some ruins with no company but Lotor and Kolivan? Kolivan, he has come to like to a point that verges on a kind of familial love, but Kolivan has the sense of fun of a man who sold his sense of fun to the devil in exchange for the ability to micro-manage the shit out of anything and everything. The real test will be whether Keith’s sanity breaks before Lotor’s. He’ll have just his communicator apart from that. A tenuous link to Voltron at best, an absolutely useless and unrewarding one at worst, because Keith does not trust himself to talk to anyone for more than two minutes before he risks audibly crying down the phone. Maybe half that time if it’s Lance or Shiro.

Allura has pulled up a map of Marmora’s bases and punches a keyword into the dashboard, causing all the disused bases to light up “We’ll need to put you somewhere without much traffic. Voltron needs to be able to come and go freely, and since we’re not the most discreet of travellers, I think we had better aim for uninhabited moons or planets if we can. That way we don’t have to worry about being discovered when we do come by to check on you.”

Allura zooms in on a lumpy thing that looks more like a half-sucked jawbreaker than it does a moon “How about this one? Chornea. Nice cool climate, plenty of trees. The base is built not that far away from an active volcano, Keith, should the biome seem a little too stable for your human tastes.”

Kolivan’s eyes grow wide “Princess, there’s a good reason we abandoned that base.”

“I know, I’ve got the specs right here. It says the moon was invaded by a semi-intelligent hive mind of Flargars ten years ago. That sounds perfect.”

“What the fuck is a Flargar?” say Pidge and Hunk in almost perfect unison.

“This.”  
The screen is filled with the image of an eight-foot, ruddy-furred thing with a dizzying amount of limbs and twice that much teeth. A short clip plays in the corner, showing an even larger Flargar unhinging a jaw the size of a Toyota and vomiting a bunch of slim tentacles that wrap about an equine looking animal and drag it screaming into its mouth.

“I used to have a pet one of them.” says Coran absently as the rest of Voltron stare in horror “She got too big for her terrarium, so I set her loose in the wild. Only, I didn’t realise that Flargars have this instinct to kill the people they imprint on, so not two weeks later I got attacked while I was gardening and had to kill her with my hand-trowel. But that’s sure to keep Lotor from trying an escape on foot.”

“I remember that. I think that might be my first memory, you fighting that Flargar with the titchy trowel. Were you wearing that ridiculous sun-hat?”

“Wait, wait, wait, wait!” seeing that Allura is about to interrupt him, Lance gently lays a hand across her mouth “No, wait a second, I’m talking. We’re not going to put Kolivan and Keith on a planet full of those demon-looking things. Al, look at that smug bastard sitting on top of the washing machine. Look at him. He’s going to train those things to eat ‘em, then he’s going to lash them into some kind of deep-space dog-sled and disappear forever. Now look at Keith. Yeah, remember him? Second leader of Voltron, has the impulse control of a hungry racoon? That’s a bad combination for an environment that’s already hostile going in. ”

She removes his hand “What’s a racoon?”

“It’s a trash panda. I don’t think that’s gonna end well.”

“Or start well.” Shiro looks at his brother sympathetically “Sorry Gecko, but it’s true. I know what you’re like when you get cabin fever.”

Keith crosses his arms “Are you ever gonna let it go? It happened when I was twelve. I’m nineteen years old, Shiro, I’m a grown-ass man.”

“I know! The bigger you get, the bigger your fights are. You’ve moved on from fighting coyotes to fighting eight-foot panther people! The hell’s gonna happen if I leave you alone with nothing to do but fight those nasty things?”

“You fought a coyote?” exclaims Hunk.

“Plural, Hunk. That was the last time I ever left him in the car at a gas station.”

“We’re getting way the hell off track here!” Keith jabs a finger at Chornea, still sharing a screen with the hulking terror of the Flargar “Look, we don’t have to stay on the first moon we land on. It might even be better to move around a little bit. Right now the priority is to just get his ass off the castle so you guys can keep doing what you’re doing. Kolivan and I will worry about the rest.”

Kolivan lays a hand on Shiro’s shoulder “Don’t worry about the kitten. He can take care of himself. And me, should the need arise. I have no doubt we will be as secure as possible on Chornea. Really, the Flargars are a bonus. I’m sure the prince has better survival instincts than Keith.”  
Internally, Kolivan is weeping. He is absolutely certain that Keith is going to have one or more near death experiences before the week is out. It’s just the way he is. He cannot help that it is in his nature to fray the nerves of the people who care about him until they are mere wisps of nervy fibre. 

Pidge creeps over to Keith and slings an arm about his waist, being too short to reach his shoulders without some significant straining “You gonna take that roast, K?”  
But she starts back a bit, as Keith responds by wrapping an arm around her shoulder and affixing her with such an evil glare she wonders if he is about to bite her.

He says loudly “Thanks. I was just about to ask if you would mind taking us.”

Coran smiles at her “Excellent idea, Number 5. Greenbean’s the one with all the terraforming tech and whatnot. She should be able to harvest enough information on the hive-mind with one quick pass of the planet to let the boys all they need to know, to keep out of the way of those things.”

“Yes, well done for volunteering Pidge.” Allura gestures towards Lotor, who is apparently not in the least bothered by the amount of time he’s spent trapped in the laundry room “I suppose I’ll wrangle him to the lion now. Better get a blindfold. And some hand-cuffs. Does anyone remember where I put the handcuffs?”

“Why?” whispers Pidge.

“You should know better than to get close to me post-roast.” he mumbles back.

 

(In the orbit of New Daibazaal)

They have to replay the security footage from the pod about eleven times before any of them can accept what they have seen. The first time, Axca takes off her helmet, believing the tinted visor must have skewed her vision so that she is not seeing things clearly. After the third play of the footage Ezor asks for the video to be enlarged so as to get a better look at what’s going on. Zethrid, for her part, stares in shock, her hands balling to fists, her jaw setting, until by the eleventh cycle of the footage she can no longer contain her temper.

She slams her fist into the table “There! You have the evidence, he acted on his own! We were innocent! Are you still gonna detain us?”

Ezor and Acxa kick her in the shins on either side. 

The head of the tribunal is neither surprised nor cowed by her outburst. They stare down at Zethrid for a moment, then confer with the man on their right behind a raised hand. 

“Zethrid, please!” hisses Acxa out of the corner of her mouth “Have some self-control!”

“This is too much. Narti gave her life for the empire. We would all give ours. And this is the way we’re treated?”

Ezor fumbles under the table, unclenching one of Zethrid’s fists and clasping her hand “Here, hold my hand. Every time you want to scream just squeeze my hand.”

The generals are seated at a long and low table in front of a raised dais where the tribunal are seated. The tribunal, a collection of old full-Galra with greying muzzles and more scars than intact flesh, are arrayed in a small pyramid and have to stoop and strain to speak to each other. The sound is irritatingly like clothes rustling together or a flock of feathered creatures taking flight. What is more frustrating than the murmuring rustle of the tribunal is the collective air of detached superiority. The looks are of barely disguised contempt each time one of them meets a general’s eyes. In terms of meting out discipline, the tribunal is second to only Haggar or Zarkon, and it is generally assumed that if one of them wants to meet with you, you are either going to die or be exiled so far into the outer-reaches of the empire it will be like a kind of death.  
Generals are not usually addressed by the tribunal unless they have openly committed treason. Because no one can figure out exactly how to react to this unique hell of a situation, the tribunal have had to spend a lot more of their precious time debating the fates of the generals than they would have liked to. Adding further insult to injury is the fact that two of the generals are clearly mixed-species. Traditionally, mixed-species people are not allowed to rise so far in rank and certainly would have never found the occasion to merit coming in front of the tribunal had Lotor not stirred the pot.

The head and topmost member of the tribunal’s pyramid looks back down at them. Their eyes go lazily between Ezor and Zethrid, the upper-lip curling, until they decide Acxa’s face is the least offensive to look at “I’m sure you understand this is an exceptional situation.”

Acxa nods. Her insides twist into knots. She does not like that the eyes of the tribunal have all found her. The only full-Galra among the generals and, they must have decided, the only one of them who can be trusted to give good answers.

“All of you are guilty of treason. Firstly, for allowing the rogue prince to attack the empire and secondly for killing one of Haggar’s intelligence agents.”

“That was not us, I feel compelled to point out.” says Acxa.

They wave a dismissive hand “No matter. You caused the breach for which he was punished with death. That is as good as killing him. Ordinarily, you would all be sentenced to the ring.”

Zethrid squeezes Ezor’s hand so hard the popping of the knuckle startles a tribunal member towards the bottom.

The ring is one of the slowest and most painful deaths available to a traitor or conspirator against the empire. Normal gladiator battles are suspended for the duration of the event- one of the few breaks the participants are allowed. The convict is put into the ring and battles literally until they are killed. The stream of creatures keeps coming and coming until the convict can no longer save themselves and is killed, usually while the upper echelons of imperial authority watch from the stands.  
Last time a convict was committed to the ring was so long ago Ezor actually remembers seeing the Champion there, before he was a Paladin of Voltron, skulking in the long-dead Sendak’s shadow and largely ignoring the fantastic spectacle down below. When she and Lotor picked him out of the crowd they could not stop muttering and giggling to each other about what sort of uses Sendak might have for a human outside of the ring. Lotor, in particular, was delighted that the Champion had arrived at the ring-side in the lab-rat’s uniform he had been outfitted with by the Druids, not in the least because it did wonderful things for the shape of the Champion’s ass. He told Ezor he planned to fight the Champion someday. Not necessarily in the ring; he just wanted to see what might happen when a Galra, juvenile and anaemic though Lotor was and has remained, pitted their wits against what appeared to be a strong specimen of humanity. Ezor thought that the Champion would squash him to paste and did not mind telling him so, which made Lotor laugh so loudly he got mean looks from everyone around them. 

Should Ezor and her sister generals be committed to the ring, it would be an incredible irony she is not sure she could stomach. 

“But, as you say, these are exceptional circumstances.” returns Acxa “In 10,000 decaphoebs of rule the Galra empire has never had a rogue of this level of authority. Nor has that rogue willingly exiled himself. Nor has there ever been such a great threat to our continued rule. If I may, Lords of the tribunal, I would point out that it is a shame to squander resources such as ourselves on the ringside, given the circumstances.”

Zethrid gives Ezor a significant look. She has already guessed what Acxa is getting at, and it is taking every modicum of her small amount of self-control not to have another outburst.

One of the women in the bottom layer leans forward, interested “So what would you have us do? Appoint you to new commands? I’ll remind you that not all of the military are as…accepting as Lotor was.”  
That is a special trick particular to the upper-echelons of Galra authority, the people so ancient many of them have foggy memories of the first time Voltron patrolled the universe, pretending that Lotor is not himself of mixed-species.

Apparently it was not at all controversial to reproduce between species when Lotor was conceived and born to some blushing Altean maiden, but the mutual destruction of Altea and Daibazaal changed that. For many years at least. To the majority of the empire’s population, being of mixed-species only becomes an issue when securing an official post in the government or military. The generals are anomalous within the military for having gotten so far, except for another man, a half-Nalise who somehow reached the rank of commodore and has gone on at his post for decaphoebs without being assassinated.  
True, the generals are not likely to be as welcome elsewhere. Common foot-soldiers and drones are no problem, but once into the realm of sergeants and majors it is going to get much tricker. 

“New commands would only hinder us at this point. I ask that you allow my sister generals and I to track down Lotor.” Acxa takes the stony silence that greets this request as permission to keep talking “Not going rogue ourselves, of course. We would be leading an expedition of your choice.”

Ezor nudges her “Aiding.”

“Aiding, I mean, aiding an expedition of your choice. As of now, Lotor is a threat to the empire. He had us convinced beforehand that he was helping in any way he could, but we watched his plans fail time and time again. He killed a colleague of ours in front of us, whom had belonged to his inner-circle as long as any of us. It’s obvious he feels no particular loyalty to us. To anything, I imagine, the way he defected to Voltron like that. The sooner he is brought in the better for the empire’s health. Besides, Lotor is a master manipulator, and is proud of that. We may be able to trick him into believing we intend to defect with him.”

“And how do we know you won’t?” asks the topmost of the tribunal “This could be a ploy. Get the empire to waste resources and attention that would be better suited to Voltron. Lotor could have planned his escape along with you.”

“Sure, he could have,” Ezor pipes up “But that seems like a pretty circuitous plan to me. And if that is what he planned it’ll be as much as a surprise to us as it will to you. Honestly? I think the prince panicked after Emperor Zarkon made it clear just how unwelcome he was in the empire’s areas. So he ran to the only safe alternative to the empire he could think of.”

After this, the generals are sent from the room so the tribunal can finish their debate in peace. As soon as the door has closed on the wizened on Galra, Zethrid throws up the foulest gesture in the physical vocabulary of the Galra language and hisses quite a few expletives through bared teeth.

“Racist old fucks!” she whispers hoarsely “I’ll show ‘em a fucking ring. I’d never go down! They’d run out of shit to send at me before I run out of fight!”

Ezor jabs her in the rib-stack with her elbow and gestures to the guards that are posted at the end of the hall “Shut up, Z.” at Acxa, she beams and opens her arms for a conciliatory hug “You did good in there! No matter what they decide, you did your best to save our asses.”

Acxa claps her briefly on the shoulder before pulling away “Well if they decide they want to kill us you do know I’m just going to grab you two and run, yes? We’ll have to find somewhere to lay low until the attention’s on something else.”

“Thank the gods. I thought you were gonna say you wanted us to run off to Lotor.”

“Fuck no, Zethrid. No. No.” Acxa’s face grows dark “He made it clear what he thinks of our...our continued presence around him. He killed Narti so easily. I doubt it would be any harder for him to dispatch anyone else here.”

“That arrogant shit. After all the decaphoebs we spent serving him.”

Ezor lays a hand across her eyes to hide the tears she fears are coming “Oh my gods, I’m sorry. I was just- when they said they were going to put us in the ring, it made me think of what he was like when he was fresh out of his sleeper pod. Remember how cute his hair was when it was all short and bobby? Oh, he was so short before second puberty! He needed a booster seat to drive the big rigs.”

Zethrid pats her awkwardly on the shoulder “That was almost 17 decaphoebs ago. He’s a different thing now. A man. Mourn that kid you met all you have to, but you’re gonna have to fight the man he grew up into.”

Ezor raises her hand. Her eyes are dry “I know. I won’t just fight that man. I’ll kill him.”

The door opens again, beckoning the generals into the room.

Once they are seated again, the head of the tribunal stands “You have two days to prepare yourselves. Bring Lotor back to the emperor. However much of him you chose to spare, that is.”


	3. Literally, into the storm

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long to get out. On the bright side, my (Australian) university year is over, so more regular uploads should be a thing now. Let's see how the Paladins are dealing with their new friend, shall we?

Ten minutes out from the castle, the evil eye Keith has been training on Lotor since they let him out of the laundry room finally gives way with a sleepy shudder, a supressed yawn tears free, Keith tips sideways and conks out completely. He hangs there against the harness of his seat. The angle is awkward, more like that of a corpse than a napper. It bothers Pidge so much she briefly leaves the controls to straighten him up into a position that makes it look less like his neck is snapped.   
Lotor watches her with some interest. Until now, he has not really had the chance to get a good look at the Green Paladin. He guessed she was small, but thought the teensy size she appeared to have was a trick of the cameras or because he was always seeing her as a furious green blur in the corner of his eye. But now, seeing her in the flesh, the truth of her dimensions proves so amusing he cannot take the idiot grin off his face. Not that he’s in any position to grin at her. 

When Pidge realised the distance between the seats was such that Lotor could probably kick Keith in the jaw if he wanted to, she got a roll of duct-tape and wrapped the whole thing around Lotor. Now the only thing he can move is his face and his hands, which she didn’t tape to the arm-rests because she ran out of material. She is beginning to wish she’d saved a strip for his mouth. 

With a significant look at Kolivan, Pidge straightens up in her seat and clears her throat “Don’t get used to that. Keith is dangerous. He doesn’t normally fall asleep all over the place.”

“Oh, no, of course not.” Lotor shoots Keith a side-long glance “He is clearly a highly-trained, highly-skilled weapon of mass destruction.”

“He is actually. For the past month the boy’s been working under the tutelage of the Blade. The destruction of your Munitions Processing Satellite in the Paglium Quadrant was his work.”  
Kolivan does not add that Keith had no idea what he had destroyed at the time. In fact, Keith had ended up on the entirely wrong satellite because he had misunderstood his instructions, panicked when he realised his mistake, and stabbed everything that looked important before ejecting himself into space in an escape pod. 

Kolivan was actually brought to tears when he heard what had happened. He is still not certain if it was from abject horror at how ridiculously inept Keith could be or pride at how ridiculously well Keith could turn a bad situation to his advantage, or if it was both of those things that prostrated him on the floor of his private quarters for a full ten minutes. 

“I’m sure.” says Lotor in the same tone of voice. 

Pidge feels that remark cut her down to the marrow. There’s something in it- something so offensively unruffled, so calm in spite of the situation that pisses her off so much she wants to electrocute the prince. Instead, she takes a deep breath, and imagines what Shiro might do instead.  
Bitch-slap Lotor with his alien hand. Alright, what other thing would Shiro do?  
Pidge allows herself a little smile. Misdirection. Another kind of slap “I don’t know how I would feel about spending so much time alone with Keith. He’s kind of a loose cannon.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand that phrase.”

“You know. A loose cannon. You shoot it, but it goes out of control and hits something you never meant to hit. That’s Keith.”

“Ah. See, the phrase in my language-” his eyes find Kolivan in the reflection from the windshield “Our language, I should say, would be ‘unsheathed’. Someone who never puts their claws away. They’re always looking for a fight. Everyone who approaches is only a potential enemy until they are proven otherwise. Is that what you’re getting at?”

“Keith doesn’t handle proof very well. Like, no matter what you do, it’s never gonna be enough to earn his trust. I’ve lost count of the number of times he’s accused me of betraying him or Voltron.”  
The last time Keith called Pidge a ‘traitor’ to her face is when she sided with Shiro in a debate over whether or not Mothman was a real thing. 

“So I suppose you’ll be glad to be rid of him for a while?” Lotor’s tone is still frustratingly even.

“Well you remember Thayserix. You lead us into a trap and humiliated us. It was all Keith’s fault. He couldn’t lead his toothbrush to his own mouth- you know what that means, right?”

Lotor rolls his eyes “Of course I know what a toothbrush is. You think my people discovered space-travel before we discovered oral hygiene?”

“Ok, glad to hear it! So, yeah, Keith couldn’t do that. Honestly? He was such an awful leader. He was even worse on the team. He’s just an all-round terrible person and I’m really kind of hoping you kill him in an escape attempt. We don’t need him for Voltron anyway.”

Lotor lets out a short bark of laughter “Alright, that’s about enough of pretences! You had me convinced for the first bit, but you laid it on far too thick. I’m guessing your next step was going to be to tell me he was too violent or too handsy with you. Or he shoots fire out of his eye-sockets. Anything to make me keep my distance, yes?”

Kolivan cringes in sympathy. 

Defeated, Pidge slumps back in her seat “Can’t blame me for trying. Plan B! Now I’ll just threaten you. I’ll just say this. I’m good at finding people. I found my brother after he’d been missing in a vast, hostile universe for two years, off a stupid code I’d only heard of one time before I used it to track him down. If something goes wrong on Chornea- if you make something go wrong, just remember how good I am at finding people. If you happen to escape and it leaves my buddies hurt in any way, I will dead-ass leave Voltron for as long as it takes me to find wherever you’re skulking. And I will kill you.”

“Save your speeches for a more deserving audience. I’ve no intention of hurting either of your ‘buddies’. As I told you, I’m not here to take revenge upon Voltron. I’m just here because Voltron happens to be the most viable option for my survival. If Zarkon had not outlawed me within the empire, I would still be working for it. You should understand right away that I have no loyalty to my father nor his ailing little fiefdom. Nor do I have a passionate desire to help that fiefdom free itself of him, but I’ll do it because it suits me.”

“Who’s all up in the pretences now?” Pidge shoots back “No, don’t snipe back at me. I’m putting a ban on speech until we get into Chornea’s orbit. If anyone talks I’ll barrel-roll us the rest of the way there.”

Thankfully, the threat works. This gives Pidge ample time to think about the enormous variety of things that could go wrong while Keith is stashed away with Voltron’s former worst enemy, and the even greater variety as to how this will break Voltron’s hearts. Shiro will die if Keith dies. It’ll be quick and painful to watch while it lasts, and completely inevitable. Some people just don’t work without each other. Keith has lost Shiro twice already. Each time he has reeled, wept, raged and progressed as best he could, because he is younger, fiercer and has more demands to make of the universe before he lets it snuff him out.   
But if Shiro lost Keith? It would be like ripping a plant up by the roots. Like handing a lit match to a man covered in gasoline. It puts a lump in Pidge’s throat to even think about it. If the worst does happen then Pidge will do what she can to make Shiro last until she has found Lotor. She’ll drag the rogue prince to Shiro’s feet and hold Lotor down for him. If Shiro won’t raise a finger for himself, Pidge will kill the prince for him, using the most painful method available to her, and after it is all over, should Shiro ask her to, she will kill him as well. 

Pidge takes measured breathes and thanks the divine intelligence that her mask covers up the few tears that have squeezed their way out. This whole situation is going to suck from start to finish.

It takes another forty-five minutes to reach Chornea. Its mother planet grows from a steady spot of light to a great gassy behemoth coloured entirely by unpleasant shades of yellow. A red sun hangs sullen some millions of miles away, alone but for Chornea, its mother and an even uglier planetoid that looks like a squashed meatball. Obviously Chornea is the only body around to have achieved a habitable environment: its mother planet is too noxious to support anything, and the sister planet is too near to the sun to support anything but the most robust of thermophilic bacteria.   
Not the most inviting of systems to dump Keith and Kolivan on. Matters are worsened by the fact that most of Chornea’s dainty circumference is covered in a thick raincloud that’s alive with lightning flashes. 

“Ah, shit. Alright. This landing’s gonna be bumpy. Greenbean, give me the coordinates to the base.”

A rudimentary map to the moon spreads over the windshield in translucent blues so Pidge can still see where she’s going. 

“Is the ban on talking lifted now? Because I have some questions about the manner in which you just addressed the Green Lion. Did you really just call her Greenbean-”

“The ban on speaking is still in effect in the back.” snaps Pidge.

Lotor shuts up, but shakes his head in exaggerated wonderment. He mouths ‘Greenbean’ to himself as if it is the foulest curse he has ever heard. 

Kolivan points to a thinner spot in the storm where spots of a green ocean are visible through the cottony fingers of cloud “Aim for that. We should worry about getting through this storm before we worry about finding the base.”

“That’s gonna stick us about 120 kilometres away from it. No big deal. Greenie’s fast.”

“I’m sorry, I’ll risk the barrel- roll, but I cannot believe the Green Lion would allow you to call her that.”

The lights in the cockpit dim for a moment and the entire structure of the lion vibrates as Greenbean purrs an affirmative. She rarely vocalises- let alone in flight. Pidge cannot help but turn around and flash Lotor a smug grin.

“Really?” Lotor addresses the ceiling of the lion “You wouldn’t consent to be named when I knew you! Where’s that stiff dignity gone now?”

 

Pidge increases the speed a little bit with the idea that she will just punch through the roughest part of the atmosphere “What do you mean when you knew her?”

He gives her an incredulous look “What do you mean? I was born only a decaphoeb after Voltron was finished. I grew up with these lions. Allura and I, together.”

Pidge clenches her jaw “Is that so?”

“She hasn’t told you then?” Lotor’s smile looks a little pained, though that might just be wishful thinking on Pidge’s part “That doesn’t surprise me. I’m sure she thought I was long-dead. The longevity of my father is freakish, as I’m sure you know.”

“What about yours? You’ve been alive for 10000 decaphoebs.”

Kolivan glances at Pidge, shaking his head in warning.

“No I haven’t.” says Lotor with some satisfaction “I only just woke up, oh, about four of your years ago, I believe. I was hidden away for almost as long as Allura and Uncle Coran.”

Suddenly, Greenbean does not seem as solid around Pidge. Blood roars in her ears. How much of this is true? Why would Allura keep this hidden from them? And why didn’t Pidge think of it before? Coran told them of how Voltron came to be. Pidge always imagined Allura must have grown with the lions in her life, and on the rare occasions she references the old Paladins she speaks of them the same way Lance will talk about his extended network of aunts, uncles and cousins. She always assumed the original Voltron acted somewhat like a family. Allura clearly cherished them. Trigel, Blaytz and Gyrgan, that is, because she has never once mentioned Zarkon.

And of course Zarkon was there. Zarkon was not corrupted until his wife was on death’s door, and no matter how far he withdrew from Voltron, he couldn’t have cut off diplomatic relations with Altea. Lotor is just as much a relic from the times before the empire as his father is. Of course Lotor was there. Allura was six earth years old when Voltron was finished and Lotor has just told her he was a newborn when the work finished up. From what Coran told them, Zarkon was not always a cruel man. Somehow she cannot imagine Zarkon separating his son from Voltron. But neither can she imagine what that must mean. Lotor as a tiny thing, passing among the Paladins with as much excitement and joy as Allura must have had. 

Once Allura told Pidge that the Paladins would take her along on safer diplomatic missions every now and then. Most of what she remembers of Old Daibazaal she says she saw through the windshield of the Red Lion. In Pidge’s mind, that cockpit morphs from Edgy’s to the Black Lion’s. It is Zarkon at the controls, younger and far less imposing, and Lotor is in a booster seat in the back. The more she thinks about it the less ridiculous it seems. Allura wouldn’t tell Voltron, of course. She would not want to give a face and a soul to their enemy that they did not already know. And for herself- she could not allow herself to think of the warm presence Zarkon must have been at one point in her life.  
So it must have made sense to Allura to ignore Lotor entirely. This brings up a whole crop of new questions: did Lotor know he would be surrendering himself to Allura when he threw himself on Voltron’s mercy? Was he counting on that? Or maybe he didn’t know. It’s not like Voltron has advertised the fact that the princess of Old Altea is among them until it’s convenient for diplomacy. Their armour is pretty good at concealing their faces. Lotor might have been just as surprised to see Allura as Voltron was surprised to have him surrender. 

Kolivan nudges her in the side and murmurs “Are you alright?”

“Yeah. I have a headache is all.”

Thankfully, the flight quickly grows too fraught to spare the energy to think any harder about what Lotor told her. Flying into atmospheric events has never been one of Pidge’s favourite things to do. Let Ben Franklin fly all the kites he wants- she has no interest in getting struck by lightning or rained on. Back on Earth when life was simpler and involved fewer brushes with death, she used to shut herself in the closet with Bae-Bae during huge thunderstorms. Bae-Bae hated thunder. Pidge wasn’t too fond of it either, though she told herself the only reason she hid herself away was to keep Bae-Bae company.   
As they near the edge of the atmosphere and the storm becomes audible beneath them, Pidge wishes she had her dog and a closet on hand. 

She brings Greenbean about to hover over the hole in the shell of the storm “Keith! Keith, wake up!”

He stirs, turns on his side and curls up into a ball as best he can around the seatbelt.

“Come on, Keith.” Kolivan reaches back and smacks Keith’s foot “It’s time to move.”

He mumbles something in Japanese. Pidge has no idea how to speak Japanese but has heard Keith say that phrase enough times to know he’s asking Shiro for an extra five minutes of sleep. 

“Would you like me to try?” asks Lotor.

“I don’t remember saying you were allowed to speak!”   
Pidge leans over the back of her seat and sets her bayard to the lowest setting. No worse than the static shocks Shiro’s metal arm will occasionally dish out. Lotor shrinks into his seat, thinking the bayard is for him, but is confused and delighted when she zaps Keith instead.

He comes to with a yelp “What the fuck, Pidge!”

“Wake up! We’re here! We’re gonna have to fly through a storm. I don’t want you biting your tongue off in your sleep.” 

Keith straightens up and glares at Lotor “What are you looking at?”

“I’m just trying to decide which one of you is more adorable. The Green Paladin’s size was working in his- pardon me, her favour, but I must admit you are quite kitten-like when you go down for a nap.”

Keith glowers “Pidge, how soon before we’re planet-side and I can lock him somewhere dark?”

“I gotta fly through the damn storm first.”

Kolivan does not look remotely ok with their situation as Green lowers into the atmosphere. There is the usual pop of displaced gas. Gravity seems to grow infinitesimally more urgent upon their bones, even though Greenbean’s shielding and internal gravity settings keep them in a protected and pressurised bubble. A fringe of fire begins to creep up the windshield as Pidge speeds forwards into the atmosphere.   
“Are you sure this is safe?” says Kolivan.

“Yes, I’ll second that question. I didn’t surrender myself to be blown up by bad piloting choices.” says Lotor.

“Question my ability to fly my lion, in my own damn lion one more time, Prince, and I’ll weld you to that chair. Not you, Kolivan. You’re fine. This is fine. Greenbean doesn’t mind a bit of lightning. Her shielding converts weather phenomena like lightning into spare energy. Later on, if I’m getting dogpiled by drones or whatever, I can discharge it and short shit out. Or electrocute it. It’s an amazing feature, actually. I’d love to figure out how to replicate it, but this system is so complex. I only figured out where the cupholder is last week.”

By the time they at last sink into the thick clouds, Greenbean is shaking like a pet-carrier with an angry possum in it and Kolivan is starting to look like the latter. His hair is standing on end as much as it can within the braid. He has pressed himself back into his seat. His claws are unsheathed and scoring the upholstery of the arm-rests. Greenbean doesn’t seem to mind, though. Thunder booms all around them. Pidge has never been so close to thunder before. Nor does she ever want to be again- it’s like having her head in a pot and while it’s being smacked with another pot. Her skull rattles about in her head. The visibility is absolute shit- she can only tell where she’s going because of Greenbean’s navigational equipment, and even that can only map out the terrain for about six metres.

“So!” Pidge exclaims through her chattering teeth “What’s Lotor short for?”

“It’s short for Lotor.” not a hair out of place. Pidge hates and admires him in equal measures.

“Great. So, Lotor Lotor?”

“It’s Lotor An-Honerva. Does it matter that you know my surname?”

“Hey, I’m happy to keep calling you Prince Fuck-head if that’s what you want.” says Keith acidly. No one has ever actually referred to Lotor as ‘Prince Fuck-head’ before this moment, but now that Keith has thought of it, it seems a missed opportunity. 

Lotor glances at him as if he is surprised Keith still exists “Which one are you again?”

“I’m the- the spare Paladin.” his and Pidge’s eyes meet in the rear-view mirror as he stumbles over his words “In case one of the other ones, uh, dies. Or whatever.”

“A spare Paladin? That can’t be fun. But I was actually asking what your name is. I heard a lot of them being exchanged and I’m not quite sure on which name goes to which face.”

“I’m Keith.”

Lotor cocks an eyebrow “And that is short for?”

“Nothing. Where I come from, a lot of people can’t say ‘Jae-an’ so I picked one out for school.”

An impressive boom of thunder rocks the cockpit. Pidge’s butt parts company of her seat for a brief moment and Kolivan looks like his soul may have just prematurely launched from his body. Lightning flashes somewhere nearby and blinds the other three for a moment, Pidge’s eyes protected by the visor of her helmet. Keith swears in one of his native languages- she still can’t tell Japanese and Korean curses apart. Lotor swears too, using a Galra curse Pidge’s translation matrix translates out as ‘this situation is a distended teat’. Funny how she’ll get butchered Galra cusses out of the matrix but earth languages like Japanese, Korean and Lance’s fast-paced Spanish remain unbreakable codes.

How thick is this damn storm? The navigation systems are completely shot except for those useless six metres, and Pidge has only her internal sense of direction to reassure her she is not just flying further on into the storm. It must break open a little closer to the ground. 

“So obviously this is Kolivan.” she nods in his direction and is perturbed to see that the only adult (because Lotor can’t be that old, on closer inspection, maybe three years younger than Shiro?) “And I’m Pidge. That’s it. Just Pidge.”

Another huge clap of thunder. This one might be inside the cockpit with them.

“And you’re going to stick with that?”

“Hey, call me whatever you want in your head but it better be ‘Pidge’ that comes outta your mouth.”

“Keith.” says Kolivan through gritted teeth “I feel there is a distinct possibility my heart will stop before we reach the ground. You know what to do in the event of that particular tragedy, yes?”

“Take your knife to Kolxa?” he shouts over the thunder.

“That’s the one! Also, throw my corpse into the woods to be eaten by the Flargars. Can’t leave any physical evidence.”

“Who’s Kolxa?” asks Pidge through her rattling teeth.

“The eldest of my daughters.”

“You have a daughter?”

“I have so many daughters it’s not even funny.” Kolivan has closed his eyes now “I’m good for nothing but daughters. I single-handedly reared a tribe of warrior women. I’ll tell you the story if we survive this.”

“I had no idea you had a family.” 

“They’re grown women now, if you’re worried about orphaning them. They won’t be overjoyed to hear I have died but it won’t surprise them either.”

Pidge puts on a final burst of speed and at last they pierce through the clouds. Stubborn fingers of cloud cling to them, but are torn off by the stiff winds that have become twice as strong outside of the churning storm. A sullen light floods the cockpit, making everyone wince. Lotor hides his face in his shoulder and lets out a soft hiss that reminds Pidge of Nosferatu, even though that was a silent movie. Keith laughs with relief. In spite of the continued turbulence he gets out of his seat and claps her on the shoulder.

“You’re awesome, Pidge.”

“Not bad for a cadet, huh?” she allows herself a small moment of satisfaction.   
Before she ever got into Greenbean, Pidge had only once tried the simulator out. It was mandatory that all cadets try it at least twice in case one of the engineering students or tech kids was sitting on some hidden talent. She mistook the throttle for the parking brake. Had it been a real space-ship in real launch conditions, the teacher assured her, she would have destroyed the launching pad, the control centre and probably herself. 

Keith stands behind Kolivan’s seat now and anchors himself with the beginnings of claws. Apparently Keith has had claws since he started his period, but furtively filed them down, figuring they were some weird secondary sex characteristic from a puberty that had no business messing with his body anyway. Makes Pidge wonder how well they teach sex ed in Texas. Since joining the Blade Keith has let his claws grow out. Now, he uses them to anchor himself in the spongey upholstery of Greenbean’s shot-gun seat.   
Keith pops his chin on top of Kolivan’s head and stares out at the grey-green landscape, wreathed in driving rain. A thin mist hangs over the shoulders of some distant mountain range.

Greenbean’s navigational equipment suddenly comes to life and begins to pinpoint interesting things for them. There is the mouth of a wide river spilling into an ocean with such a high salt content it would sting human skin. The air is quite high in oxygen- too rich, in fact, for Galra, who have low requirements, so Lotor and Kolivan will probably have to wear masks for the duration of their stay on Chornea. A thunderclap spooks a flock of lopsided reptilian things out of a treetop. 

“They look like dinosaurs.” says Keith with a touch of childish excitement.

“They’re one of the only things to have survived the Flargars’ onslaught. They can’t climb, you see, which is why our base is on top of a mountain.” says Kolivan, still stiff and tense from their bumpy entry.

For Greenbean, it’s a quick shot over to the base. They pass over a thin peninsula, a couple of islands battered by a choppy sea, in which Keith swears he can see the pale shadows of huge things just beneath the surface, and at last alight in some wind-swept woods not too far from the base of the volcano Allura promised them. A squat, solid building made of black stone hunkers against the wind at the centre of the grove. The base is perched atop the swell of a huge hill that punches through the top of the trees, sheltered in a grove of strangely stout and thick specimens which Greenbean identifies as a very distant ancestor of the earth’s own pine-tree. Pine trees are aliens? Pidge files away that piece of information to be further examined later on, for her cryptid files, and lands on the shabby launch-pad.  
Keith cuts Lotor out of the duct-tape with his knife and keeps it pointed at the prince’s throat as he stretches out and twists a couple of kinks out of his bones. 

Pidge squeezes past them and rummages around in Greenbean’s supply hatch until she produces a spare Marmora mask- Keith is the only person she knows who can forget masks which are holographically attached to his actual fucking armour. She offers it to Lotor.

“This is sacrilege against the Blade,” says Kolivan behind his own mask “To put a mask on the son of the bastard we have sworn to over-thrown.”

“You should learn to enjoy the irony of things a little more.” replies Lotor.

After a quick adjustment to the planet’s slightly gentler gravity, Greenbean disgorges the party through her mouth, making her hairball noise for Pidge’s amusement. The force of the wind almost blows Pidge back inside her jaws and she has to hold Kolivan’s arm to keep her feet on the ground. They hustle under the shelter of the low ceiling. Kolivan approaches the door and strips off a glove to press his hand up against a dusty lock. With an asthmatic wheeze, the door slides open for them. A blast of stale air washes over them, with the unmistakable tang of blood thick in it.

From deep within the base, a chorus of growls goes up. There is the sound of enormous claws on a ceramic floor. A gigantic shape fills up the hall that has just opened to them.

“Ah.” says Kolivan.

Keith steps in front of Pidge. She budges him out of the way to stand beside him. Lotor takes a smart step back and starts to pull his hair into a ponytail with a mysteriously produced chord he probably meant to throttle Keith with.

Kolivan draws his own knife “So the Flargars did learn to climb.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had a dream that Keith went home with Kolivan for some kind of Galra Thanksgiving and Kolivan had like five adult daughters who were all tattooed, scarred-up badasses and were utterly charmed by the tiny boy Kolivan brought back with him. I expect they will appear at some point later on in the fic.


	4. Henry-Tsuchiyoh

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter we discover the true antagonist of Keith's story is an early 2000s projector being used to show the third Matrix movie

Haggar, as it turns out, has been a busy little worker bee for the glory of the Galra empire. Hunk has only been looking for ten minutes and has already found over 30 heavenly bodies rigged with the same chemical, magical bullshit payload as the planet that almost killed them about three hours ago. He adds the coordinates of payload onto the same map Coran once used to show Lance how far away Earth was. With each discovery, the headache forming in his temple gets a little more intense. It does not help that Coran and Allura have for some reason picked the living room to have an epic argument, out of all the places in the castle they could go. Because Hunk put his headphones on they think he cannot hear a word they’re saying, nor is he interested enough in their conflict to tracking the argument.  
In fact, Hunk hasn’t missed a single word. It is a habit of his to put on something classical to help him focus on work. Over Faure’s ‘Le cantique de Jean Racine’, Hunk can hear every word of their argument, lovingly translated from ancient Altean to modern English by the castle’s translation matrix. Allura’s increasingly high-pitched voice is actually quite a good compliment to the bass tones of the choir humming in his ear.

“…the colour of his skin is completely changed as well! He looks like a quiznakking zombie! And he must be, because how else would he have survived?” Allura is pacing all over the place, nervous, passing her helmet between her hands like a basketball, while Coran stands against the wall with his arms tightly folded.

“We shouldn’t make any assumptions yet-”

“Coran, did we see the same person? I don’t understand how you’re not panicking.”

“Why should I panic? Lotor has been removed from the base of our operations. With Keith on his case, he can’t mess anything up for us.” 

Hunk finds himself nodding along with Coran. He doesn’t care how resourceful and sneaky Lotor might be, there is just no way to accomplish anything when Keith is on your case. He’s like a combination of a vengeful serial killer and Sherlock Holmes- the opium addicted lunatic, not the Benedict Cumberbatch incarnation. It’s sort of terrifying.

“How the shit is he still alive, though? He’s lost all his markings, he’s the colour of a drowned Galra, I don’t even think he was breathing when I saw him…am I going crazy, Coran, or are you following me? Because, I swear to the gods, he was never going to look so much like his father, was he?” Allura lifts her helmet as if to toss it against the wall, but lowers her arm a second later “Do you realise he might be older than me now? I mean, he most definitely is older than me. If our ages were where they should be he wouldn’t be any bigger than Pidge is.”

Mechanically, Hunk enters the coordinates of another heximite payload. It reminds him of listening in on the arguments his moms and older brother used to have, back when his brother was still trying his hand at being the family rebel and staying out past his curfew as often as he could get away with. Hunk feels like an eight-year-old drowning out an argument over the breakfast table with Bon Iver again, and has to smile. He misses his brother fiercely at the moment. Both the young half-assed rebel and the law-abiding accountant he grew into.  
Makes him wonder if Allura is missing someone too.

“It has been 10,000 decaphoebs since we last saw him. Frankly I’m surprised he is not as large as his father at this point.”

As far as Hunk and Pidge have been able to work out, 10,000 decaphoebs is only worth 3500 years in their time. Altean biology is pretty close to human biology, from what Hunk has observed of their need to sleep and eat in roughly the same way, and Galra have proved to be giant space-cats, so it stretches his imagination to think that Lotor has lived some 3500 years and still looks like a teenaged model. At the very least he should have wrinkles. He’s with Allura on that one- Lotor must have just come out of some sort of suspended animation. Maybe not a healing pod. Something more sinister and ancient the Alteans would be too wary of to use in their own ships, even though it is apparently so effective at staving off the ravages of age.

“Exactly! He should be eight feet of scaly terror, but he’s not! He’s barely taller than me. What did they do to keep him alive this long? And why did they even try? Frankly, if Zarkon’s thinker got screwed over by what happened to him in the rift, I’m surprised he remembered having a son at all.”

“Oh, that’s not the sort of thing you forget, no matter what happens to you.” Hunk watches Coran thump himself in the middle of the chest where the Altean heart is located “Children stay right here.”

“Is this one of those things I’ll understand when I’m older?”

“When you have children of your own.”

“You know what? Having the Paladins is almost like having kids. Except I don’t have to change them or anything.”

Coran rolls his eyes, which Hunk doesn’t think he has ever seen him do before “No, princess, it’s really not like having children.”

“How is it not? They scream, they wreck everything, they wake me up in the middle of the night-”

“Having children is much harder.”

“You didn’t- what, just me, on my own was harder to manage than all of the Paladins put together?”

“Much.”

Hunk mashes a giggle against his fist. They hear him anyway and look towards him. Hunk pretends he was just clearing his throat and makes a show of stretching his arms out, not trusting himself to continue eavesdropping without being busted.

“Any luck?” asks Allura with a forced cheerfulness which, she quickly realises, is entirely the wrong tone to use when asking a team-mate if he has found more planet-bombs.

Hunk nods “Too much luck, actually. I’ve got a veritable feast of payloads here. I did a few cursory looks over the compositions of the payloads. There’s only so much information I have access to from the castle’s databanks, since we’re still updating our info. Terraforming got really popular over the last couple of centuries. Anyway, it looks like most of them are the same basic deposit of explosive chemical and mineral with a magical fuel. The good news? Not one of these bombs is gonna go off without a ritual to act as the trigger. So we’re gonna be alright as long as we get to the payloads and mess up the magical work beyond repair.”

Allura leans over his shoulder. Her face grows grim as she takes in the sheer amount of coordinates Hunk has marked “How do we do that?”

“I was hoping one of you guys would know.”

“Just because I shoot magical energy all over the place doesn’t mean I know what I’m doing. Or how to control it. I haven’t had any druid training Hunk, I’m basically hopeless at this magic thing. We’re just lucky I haven’t hurt anybody. Badly, I mean.”  
The incident to which she is referring is just another of the many testaments, to Hunk’s mind, of Shiro’s incredible survival instinct. Who else would have had the reflexes to deflect a sudden blast of white-hot magical energy fired at his back without any sort of prelude or warning? Shiro somehow heard the noise Allura made when discharging the energy- again, impressive, because it was a sneeze that shook all that energy out of her, and Allura has the daintiest sneezes of anyone Hunk has ever known- and knew to take up the frying pan to defend himself, which he did, the bolt narrowly glancing off the pan he had put in front of his face. Such was the power of the bolt that it broke one of the lovely arches in half and showered everybody with rubble. Shiro was fine, once he picked himself up and dusted himself off, though the same cannot be said for the ceiling of the living room.

Coran materialises at his other side “It should be an easy matter to find a druid. We don’t need an Altean- just someone who knows their stuff. I’m sure Kolivan can recommend someone to us.”

“I suppose I had better check in with Lance. The others should have contacted him by now.”

“And I’ll go ring the Blade up. I’m absolutely sure I heard Regris, may the divine intelligences rest her poor soul, mention a friend who was a druid.” Coran pats Hunk on the back “Perhaps you should bed down for a while, chap. I hope you don’t mind my saying you look terrible.”

“Thanks Coran, but I think Allura needs it more than me.”

She flashes him a stern look. He should know better than to comment on her mortality by now- as far as he and Voltron are concerned, Allura is an immortal goddess who never fatigues or weakens, such as fitting for the commanding officer of Voltron. To suggest otherwise is akin to blasphemy.

Mustering his courage, Hunk persists “In fact I think I’ll go check in with Lance. Allura, you should just go to sleep. You did get a huge shock from the payload-”

“You what?” Hunk can almost see Coran’s moustache bristle in alarm “You didn’t tell me that.”

Allura pinches Hunk’s elbow “It didn’t seem important.”

“She was coughing smoke.” adds Hunk.

“In that case you shouldn’t even be on your feet! Off to bed with you, go on, go on!” Coran seizes his princess by the shoulders and steers her towards the door “I’ll come by later with something to help you sleep through the night-cycle.”

“It’s really not necessary-” begins Allura, whose attempt at stern but well-meaning determination is undercut by the evil eye she has affixed Hunk with.

Coran makes a shooing gesture “Go on!”

She trudges defeated down the hall. 

“That child has never ever had a good relationship with her bed-times.” Coran massages his temples with the air of a long-suffering nanny, which, now that Hunk thinks about it, is probably an accurate assessment of Coran’s position “When she was an infant she’d never sleep through the night. I was up and down every two vargas with a bottle or a rock for her to teethe herself to sleep on.”

Hunk imagines a younger (but still gloriously moustachioed) Coran stumbling about in a bathrobe with a fussy infant clutched to him and has to smile. They would have been a cute little pair, back when Allura had not yet developed that imperious sense of authority she carries around most of the time. He also has to wonder if it was always Coran that did this. Allura has only mentioned her mother in passing, so Hunk gets the impression that Allura Senior’s attentions were more often focussed on the pressures that came with being Empress of Altea than raising her heiress. Apparently Alfor was the military leader of Altea- he was only an Emperor for the last two or so years of the conflict with Zarkon, after Allura’s mother was killed in some shady way that neither she or Coran have been willing to describe so far.   
Still, Allura seemed pretty broken up about it when her father’s artificial intelligence was deleted from the castle, and she’s always excited to talk about what the last batch of Paladins were like. She had to have spent at least some time growing up with Alfor and the other Paladins. 

“Well!” says Hunk too loudly, standing up “I’ll go see how Lance is doing. Then I’ll probably go down for the night too. Long day, huh? Long, horrible day.”

He takes his leave of Coran with a pat on the shoulder. God, it was a rough day. Everything hurts. Hunk cannot even begin to pinpoint particular spots that hurt- it’s just a terrible ache all over, inside and outside. He’s not sure he wants to sleep tonight, because the pain will be busy converting itself to an incredible soreness that will make it hard for him to lift his arm over his head the next day. This is a more extreme version of the normal amount of whiplash and bruises that come from flying around a giant space-cat that was created for a species that evidently had a lot more padding around the bone than Hunk does.   
Some days he’ll tumble out of Kitty feeling like a shaken can of Pepsi, except he’s full of bones and tissue instead. If the integrity of his container is troubled any further his insides will shoot out in a pressurised spray and get everywhere. 

This is the excuse, anyway, he uses when Lance asks him if he needs a hug.

“ _Claro_. You just looked like you needed one is all.”

Lance has retreated to Edgy’s hangar, as he tends to in times of distress. The partition between Edgy and Guapa’s hangars has also been sucked up into the ceiling, presumably so Guapa can keep an eye on Lance as well. In spite of the wealth of space in which to sprawl the lions are using each other as mattresses in a convoluted tangle of bodies that only housecats and snakes can manage. If it weren’t for the helpful colour-coding Hunk would have no idea what limb belonged to which lion. Lance leans up against something vaguely ankle-shaped, his laptop open on the ground. 

“Still waiting?” Hunk takes a spot beside Lance. Several vital organs seem to implode as he stoops, and he is ninety percent sure a couple of vertebrae shatter as he puts his back to the maybe-ankle. 

Lance nods sullenly.

“Aw, Lance. I’m sorry. I know this has been hard on you.”

Lance’s skin is just light enough that Hunk can see the blood rise in his cheeks “On all of us.” he mumbles.

“Well…not all of us miss Keith as bad as you do.”

“Maybe I miss Kolivan. Ever think about that? Kolivan and I might have the deepest, most satisfying relationship out of everybody on this castle. Forget your bromance with Pidge. Me and Kolivan? We’re like Thelma and Louise, but instead of the patriarchy, it’s the Galra empire.”

Hunk nods and hears a slight crack in his neck. Hopefully that is the sound of something slotting back into place rather than rocketing out of alignment with his spinal column.

Lance continues, his increasing anger directed at the stubbornly silent com channel open on his laptop “I mean, who gives a _puta_ if Keith wants to go off and play the hero all by himself?”

“Did you just say ‘who gives a bitch’?” 

“You know what I mean, Henry-Tschiyoh!” Lance just full-named him. He’s even more upset than Hunk suspected “I mean he’s a – a dick for pulling this shit on us! We’re supposed to be a team! He was supposed to lead us. Then the second Shiro gets back from his sabbatical to space-hell, it’s all, whoops, I gotta go get my ass adopted by a bunch of Galra-ish super assassins and learn their religion of pointless self-sacrifice. Here I go, squeezing into a frustratingly erotic body-suit! I sure hope I don’t die far far away from my one living blood relative and all the other people who actually love me in this vast, cold universe. Don’t wait up for me!”

“Aw man, that’s too cold. Kolivan loves Keith. He calls him ‘kitten’ and stuff.”

Edgy lets out a rumble of what might be agreement. Or he might be telling Lance to shut up. 

Lance swivels around to snipe at the jumble of lions “Don’t you start defending him, Edgelord. I am so done with you hot headed dudes in red!”

“Is he saying actual words in your head right now? Kitty, she does that sometimes but she prefers to kind of…kind of fart images into my head. It’s weird.”

“Yeah, he’s saying words. They’re all Japanese or Korean. I’ve got no fucking idea what he’s saying, but the gist is ‘Keith did nothing wrong’. That’s always the goddamn gist with this dicklord.” Lance raps Edgy’s carapace for emphasis.

At this, Edgy’s head rears up from the pile of lion and cranes towards Lance. Hunk scoots backwards, sure he is about to watch his friend be eaten for his transgressions, then laughs when Edgy nuzzles Lance with his nose. Lance squawks a feeble protest. Edgy pushes him onto his side and, disentangling a paw from the still sleeping Guapa, gently flattens Lance with a paw.

“No!” says Lance “ _Nunca! No te tocarme. Traidor. ¡No quiero sus abrazos, manolargo_!”

Edgy lets him up a second later and retreats into the nap-pile again. 

“Hey. I was kind of joking around before, but this is really messing with you, isn’t it?”

Lance’s face is sullen “More than I want it to be.”

“You know why I think that is.”

“I know,” Lance pulls the laptop into his lap again “And you know I’m not interested in talking about it. We’re just not gonna go there. I don’t even want to get into that ridiculous emotional shit. There’s more important things to deal with right now.”

Hunk shrugs, and regrets it when he hears more of his spinal column slide out of alignment “Whatever you say.”

Throwing his hands up, Lance starts to sputter “I just don’t think it’s the right time to start something with- with anybody! I’ll be best friends with everybody, alright? I’ll bond. I’ll adopt Coran as my space-Tío and Allura as my space-prima and sort my shit with Shiro out- fine, but I just don’t have the fucking energy for anything else. I’ll flirt my way across the galaxies- I just don’t want to commit to somebody. I just- I’m shit at romance in general, serious romantic shit, because I have the self-esteem of a peanut and Keith is weirdly Machiavellian right now and, just, frustrating and inscrutable- and he’s making me use fucking words like ‘inscrutable’. What the shit am I doing? I don’t say shit like ‘inscrutable’, Henry, do you see what that alien boy is doing to me? He’s like an electric whisk and my brains are the delicious cake batter. Now imagine me actually cuddling this dicklord, like, openly crushing on him and constructing a strong relationship based on mutual trust and communication. I’d be an actual flaming mess. I’d be so distracted in battle that I’d die multiple times.”

“I think you made your point Lance-”

“Hold on, I ain’t finished making it. Do you realise out of the three relationships I’ve had up to this point that all of them but one have been with girls? And that thing with Jamal- that fell on its face after two months because apparently its not masculine to admit emotions are a thing. Keith is like that! I mean, ok, obviously it’s because he just has a hard time with emotions independently from the whole cult of toxic masculinity- _por Dios, sueno como mi gemela y sus estudios de género _\- and I’m a mess there too. Imagine that. On top of all the stress from the fact that we’re fighting a goddamn war for the fate of the goddamn universe, me and Keith are acting like love-struck teenagers all the time! And what if we break up? I’ll just be flooding the castle with ‘Ojalá’ and my other _‘porqué nadie me ama_ ’ songs-”__

__“Lance.”_ _

__“What?” he barks._ _

__“You’re start to look like Pidge with the last Matrix movie.”_ _

__The incident to which Hunk’s referring is infamous at the Garrison. About three weeks into the winter semester, the professor that taught ‘History of Space-flight’ came in with a mean hang-over and stuck on the last Matrix movie rather than teaching a lesson. While Dr Thomas dozed at the back of the amphitheatre, Hunk read a Riordan book under his desk and Lance cleaned up the quicks of his nails with a file, Pidge was stewing in a quiet rage. This was before Pidge had really begun to warm to Lance and Hunk, so she was sitting behind them, muttering to herself about the beating the laws of science and logic were taking from the Wachowskies until finally she could take it no longer._ _

__“Dammit Percy.” Hunk mumbled to himself._ _

__“I really should stop using black nail polish.” said Lance, offering Hunk his nails for inspection._ _

__“GOD FUCKING DAMN YOU LANA AND LILLY! I LOOKED UP TO YOU FUCKS!”_ _

__All eyes turned on Pidge, who had stood up on her little lap desk and had a shoe in her hand._ _

__“MAKE FUCKING SENSE YOU FUCKING MOVIE!”_ _

__And she threw her size 4 sneaker at the screen. The throw was bad and whacked a kid in the front row instead of the projector she was aiming for- incidentally, this was Keith, who was at the time still unaware of his intense rivalry with Lance. Pidge then charged out of her row, down the aisle, tore off her other shoe and beat the projector from side to side until it fell off the desk.  
She then ran off down the hall, shouting curses that would have not only made a sailor blush, but slap her across the face. Only when Pidge was gone and somebody had turned the lights on to better inspect the damage did Dr Thomas wake up, and all hell broke loose shortly afterwards. _ _

__Unbeknownst to the rest of Voltron, this is actually the incident which ended in Keith being expelled from the school. The truth mutated to the extent that somehow ‘Keith Kogane got hit in the head with a tiny shoe’ became ‘Keith Kogane killed the projector with a tiny shoe’. Iverson and other ranking members of the Garrison had been looking for a reason to expel Keith from the school- it was uncomfortable to have Shiro’s little brother hanging around, a potent reminder of how much the mission had cost them, and a constant voice of criticism in their ear. A week later Keith was out in his desert cabin wondering what the hell to do with his life, Lance was unexpectedly robbed of his secret rival and left with an inexplicable grief that stole his sleep for weeks afterwards, Hunk had a newfound respect for the littlest member of his simulation team and Pidge had to filch a new pair of sneakers from the lost and found._ _

__But this is not what Lance thinks of when Hunk informs him he looks like Pidge in the throes of her Matrix-meltdown. He takes several deep breaths and leans heavily back against the lions.  
Wordlessly, Hunk hugs him. Lance hugs him back. He starts back, hearing an alarming pop in Hunk’s shoulder._ _

__“What was that?”_ _

__“Just my bones. Going back where they should be.” says Hunk through a grimace._ _

__“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t get so worked up-”_ _

__“Hey, hey, you’re stressed as hell,” Hunk holds him at arm’s length “We’re all stressed as hell and we’re all dealing with it in any way we can. I don’t mind you losing your shit every now and then. It’s just me.”_ _

__Lance squares his jaw “Yeah.”_ _

__The communication channel is still blank and untouched._ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lance's translations  
>  1) No! Never! Don't touch me. Traitor. I don't want your hugs 'big hand' (implies you're a handsy pervert, or you ate everything in the fridge depending on the context)  
> 2) Tío= uncle. Prima= female cousin   
> 3) Oh God I sound like my twin sister and her gender studies  
> 4) Ojalá= famous Cuban song. Its lyrics describe a painful break-up, but it gets played everywhere. It ain't a party until this song gets played  
> 5) Why does nobody love me


	5. Janitorial duties

The first thing that happens is Pidge gets eaten. Tendrils shoot out of the darkness faster than any of them can react, wrap about her tiny waist and whip her into the maw of the emerging Flargar. A second later the hall and its terrifying occupant is lit by a massive surge of electrical power. Pidge comes sailing out the way she came and rolls halfway across the launch pad before the momentum finally gives out, and she is left spread-eagled on her back, smoking gently.

The injured Flargar lets out a strangely bovine noise and retreats with difficulty. For something of its size it moves quickly- it is gone around the dark corner before anyone can think of what to do.

“Pidge?” shouts Keith “Are you-”

“I am dead.” she pulls herself into a sitting position.

He rushes to her side and helps her to stand, then when she promptly overbalances, goes down with her and provides a softer landing.

“That must have been a sentry. It will have informed the rest of the hive by now. They’ll know we’re here now.” Kolivan glances over at the sprawling Paladins “Are you alright?”

Pidge gets up. This time with more success because she has Keith to push off of “Am I alright? Are there stars in the sky? Is Keith gay? What kind of question is that, Kolivan! Pidge is always alright!”

“Pidge is kneeling on my tits.” adds Keith.

“Whoops.” 

“Nothing else for it. We had better burn the place down. Move on. Find another base.” Lotor starts back towards Greenbean, but Kolivan quickly snags him by the scruff of his neck.

“No.”

Lotor hangs there. He maintains a certain amount of dignity even while his feet kick for the ground “Are you sure you’re not opposed to the idea because I said it? I’m sure if Pidge said it you would have no problem packing up and moving on.”

Kolivan’s face is obscured by his mask but the poisonous glare is easily felt through it “I would. This is where we told Voltron we would be. We’ve already lost a lot of time coming through the storm. How much longer before they send someone after us? The point of getting you out of the castle is to prevent an unnecessary consumption of Voltron and the Coalition’s resources-” he is interrupted by a chorus of howls coming up from the building. The sound reverberates deeply and powerfully into the surrounding woods. A swarm of the dinosaur things Keith remarked on earlier take flight in all directions.  
Kolivan clears his throat and continues “So rather than waste time trying to locate a new place to put you, we will clean this spot out.”

“You don’t seem to grasp the fact that you’re suggesting we take on an established hivemind of Flargars. What if they call for help from a neighbouring hive? What if they kill all of us? Worse, what if they kill all of you save for me? How do I explain myself when the rest of Voltron comes for their misplaced teammates and finds me as the sole survivor? I didn’t surrender myself to be condemned by poor decisions.”

“Well, Lotor, you should have thought your situation out a little better. Here at team Voltron all we make are poor decisions.”

“Amen.” wheezes Keith.

Then everything goes to hell at once. The ground rumbles beneath their feet. A huge fissure cracks the launch-pad into thirds, forcing Greenbean to leap into the air as the part she is on, the part over-hanging, begins to sag towards the ground. Kolivan tosses Lotor like a shot-put master to the relative safety of the hallway. Lotor skids a couple of feet into the darkness, then shoots into it as a tendril wraps around his waist and takes him out of sight.

“Quiznak!” says Kolivan.

At last the attacking Flargar manages to haul itself up onto what remains of the launchpad. A huge paw, followed by it thrusting its huge head through the cracks with so much force that nearly half of the pad snaps off. Keith starts to go down with it.  
Pidge’s jetpack sputters to life. Dodging past the Flargar’s open jaw, she grabs Keith by the waist and pulls him upright just as the launchpad finally gives way. Only now does Pidge realise how steep this mountain is- if Keith fell down with the launchpad, he would have kept going down a series of steep cliffs and screes for at least half a mile.

“Holy shit!” she exclaims.

“Pidge.” says Keith, but the Flargar is already upon them. It tears them from each other. It hangs Keith by the ankle over its unhinged jaw, over whirring reams of teeth. 

Keith immediately latches onto the tentacle above his head with his new claws and clings. The Flargar shakes him, but to no effect. Keith begins to do to the tentacle what cats do to curtains. Greasy yellow blood oozes out from under his claws. Another tentacle comes to pull him off, but Keith’s grip is too tight, and the Flargar quickly realises it is not going to rid itself of Keith without also pulling out an enormous chunk of itself. 

Meanwhile the Flargar is also trying to figure out how to hold Pidge so that the fire spewing out of the back of her jetpack won’t crisp it up. Fortunately for Pidge, Flargars don’t have the capacity for more than the tiniest amount of independent thought, and it does not occur to the Flargar to turn her upside-down. In the end it just drops her on her back and attempts to step on her. But the second Pidge is free, she blasts off at the top speed the jet pack is capable of. Pidge doesn’t expect to be dropped. Instead of recouping for a fresh attack she sails straight off the mountain and disappears into the alpine treetops.

“Pidge?” calls Keith.

By way of response, he hears a scream fading into the distance. 

He looks up to Greenbean “Go get her!”

Greenbean gives a non-committal rumble. She is more interested in what’s happening on the remains of the launch-pad.   
What is happening is Kolivan is backing up towards the hallway. He recognises that they have completely lost the launch-pad and would rather take his chances with whatever took Lotor than this enraged one out here. He gestures for Keith to join him.

Keith gestures helplessly towards the woods “I have to-” then the Flargar’s claw suddenly lands on his chest and pins him flat. The claws have just barely missed piercing his rib-cage. Instead, one has pushed halfway into his shoulder. 

The pain winds him. Keith’s eyes water. Then, consoling himself with the thought that this pain is only half as bad as his period can be, he kicks upwards with all of his strength. To his surprise the entirety of the Flargar lifts off of him. Yellow blood splatters his chest. The Flargar has reared back in terror- in an attempt to get away from the greenish projectile that has flown full-force into its face with the sound of a skull cracking.  
Pidge is screaming again. This time in triumph and presumably with a little bit of hysteria, because she just body-slammed a Flargar in the snout and eyes, narrowly missing what would have been a hilarious if tragic fate by flying straight into its open mouth.

Kolivan is suddenly at his side, pulling him by the shoulder he does not realise is wounded. 

“Kol-” Keith can’t seem to finish a sentence today “Hurting me.”

“Gods.” Kolivan puts an arm around his waist instead. He shields Keith as they run for the mouth of the hallway.

The Flargar has sagged back onto the remainders of the launchpad. Its tentacles twitch. Its terrible mouth yawns open, yellow blood pouring from it. The powerful thrashings of its death throes begin to crumble what little remained of the launchpad, then it collapses entirely under the weight of the dead Flargar. Corpse and rubble go down. Keith reaches for Pidge with his good arm. She slows as much as she can and pretty much falls into his arms. Her hand catches the edge of his wound and latches briefly- she thinks she is steadying herself on his uniform.

The look on her face when she sees what she’s hooked her fingers in is nothing short of heart-broken “Jesus! I’m so so sorry-”

“I can’t feel it.” he lies.  
Period, he tells himself, no worse than a period. Space can flail and beat against him all it wants. Keith is a transman from North America’s Bible Belt. Nothing can phase him. 

“Good gods!” comes a voice from the end of the hallway. Lotor emerges from the shadows. He has so much of the greasy yellow blood on him he looks kind of like a banana “Where were you useless quiznaks while I was being attacked?”

“I got thrown into the woods, alright? Keith’s hurt. Are you hurt?” Pidge gives him a quick once-over. Even with Lotor’s coat of blood she can see he is unscathed “What did you do with yours, wear it? Where’d it go?”

Lotor nods down the hall “To wherever Flargar souls go when they die, assuming they have them.”

“What do we do now?” Pidge looks to Keith.

Keith leans on Kolivan with his good shoulder “Kolivan, what have we got in the way of defences?”

“There are some pylons for a particle-barrier a little ways down the mountain that can form a dome. I don’t know how many of them are working, but even if we have just two it should be enough to keep out the Flargars. The barrier was designed to withstand an aerial assault- it didn’t, by the way, I distinctly remember it didn’t.” then, in answer to Pidge and Lotor’s quizzical expressions: “I was raised here. All three of my parents were part of the Blade. They were all posted to this base back when it was…when it was more than a hellhole filled with Flargars.”

“Particle barrier. Sound good. Pidge, can you get Greenbean to scan the building? See if she can tell how much of the wiring is intact. If it’s not too bad you can do a quick patch-job, right?”

Pidge shrugs “I guess so? It won’t be a Hunk-quality job.”

“Not to worry. I have training as an engineer.” Lotor, belatedly tucks his ponytail into his collar to avoid further saturation “And might I ask what a Hunk is?”

“The big dude with the headband. He was the one who told you he would elbow your face concave if you hurt us.” supplies Pidge.

“Ah, him. He was quite large, wasn’t he? Do you all look like that after second puberty?”

“The fuck is second puberty?” scoffs Pidge “Hunk’s younger than Keith, y’know. He’s only seventeen- uh, 48 decaphoebs.”

A scraping noise fills the hallway. They all turn in unison as the mangled body of Lotor’s Flargar comes forwards. But it is not moving of its own accord. Another Flargar behind it is pushing the body, trying to clear the obstacle between it and its prey. The body moves for them in steady increments of metres. Kolivan backs his juniors up towards the mouth of the hall, which has turned into a sheer drop of about 30 metres onto the dead Flargar. By a stroke of awful luck its mouth is directly beneath them. If they just jump down there’s a good chance one of them will land in the mouth, which would be akin to landing on a bunch of knives. 

“We gotta go up.” says Pidge “But the jetpacks can’t handle the weight.”

Alfor was roughly the size of an adult human- a little lighter, actually, because Altean bones are apparently hollow, which explains why Coran and Allura sleep under heat-lamps. Trigel’s people evolved from sentient moss- an evolutionary story which gives Pidge a headache every time she thinks about it- and thusly their adults were about the weight of a small bundle of sticks. The boots of Pidge’s suit are weighted from when Trigel wore them. Presumably to keep her from blowing away like a wayward sycamore seed every time Voltron fought in a stiff breeze.   
Thusly the jetpacks aren’t built to handle much more weight than the Paladins already have. Keith eats like a bird and Pidge might as well be made of packing foam for how much she weighs, but neither of them can accommodate a juvenile or adult Galra. A design flaw in the armour now that Pidge thinks about it. Something she would have liked to punch Alfor’s AI in the head for before Allura sacrificed him to exorcise the castle of Sendak’s possession. 

“The vents?” Kolivan points upwards.

A grate is mounted in the ceiling- big enough for Kolivan to get through, certainly.

“That’ll do.” Keith gives himself a quick boost on his jetpack and smacks the grate free with his sword.

Pidge goes up, then Keith, then Lotor, then last of all Kolivan gets up there with a mighty jump and a bit of ungraceful scrambling. Just as Kolivan’s gotten his legs out of the way, the dead Flargar at last slithers out of the hall and lands on its dead brethren with a sickening series of crunches. The new aggressor sways on its massive paws in confusion. Where did the prey go?

“Why are these big enough to stand in?” hisses Keith to Kolivan.

“They doubled as evacuation routes. There might be some dead people in here.”

“Dead- what?” squawks Pidge.

Kolivan shrugs morosely “Do you think we abandoned this base peacefully?”

Keith’s answer is lost as the Flargar vomits a whole mess of tentacles into the vent. Mercifully, they stab upwards into the ceiling above and keep going. Clapping a hand over her pounding heart, Pidge grabs Lotor by the wrist and beats a quick retreat to the branching ends of the vents, shoving him around the right bend as she pleads for Greenbean to finish her scan already. Now that they are inside the bones of the building, it is much easier to hear the Flargar infestation. From all directions, there is a low, furious series of roars; a crowd at a motor derby combined with a colony of agitated fruit-bats. 

When the scan comes up on the inside of her visor Pidge makes a noise like a smoker having their first cigarette after a trans-Atlantic flight.  
“Looks like the wiring for the particle barrier is all in one place, except for the stuff that’s underground. Kolivan- you said you grew up here?”

He nods “I know what you’re thinking. Most of the bombardment was concentrated on top of the barrier. It was just smashed, it didn’t short out the system or destroy the underground wiring.”

Pidge races through the scan with crazed eyes “Can you get us down to the basement level? That’s where it’s activated from.”

Lotor shakes her hand from his wrist “I don’t see the point of trapping ourselves in here with those things. We should drive them out before you activate the barrier.”

A prickle of unease climbs Keith’s spine. He was about to say the same thing.

“What do you want to do?” he says a little tersely.

“Get them out of the building, obviously. It’ll be easy. This isn’t the first time I’ve come up against their kind. Every Flargar hivemind has a queen, obviously, and then the lieutenant that takes over if the queen is killed, so the hive doesn’t just collapse immediately. I vote we drive the queen and her lieutenant over the edge of the mountain. Once they get out of range from each other, they start to lose the hive and die because they haven’t got enough independent brain function to keep themselves going, so they have to follow. If both the queen and lieutenant leave or are killed their hivemind will follow naturally. After that I can lend Pidge whatever sort of help she needs with the engine. Of course we could just kill them both on the base but I’m assuming you don’t want a bunch of gargantuan corpses rotting all over the place.”

It makes Keith mad that Lotor’s being so level-headed and cool about this. In fact, Keith has never wanted to punch anybody more in the nose- not even Iverson when he told that bald-faced ‘pilot error’ lie, because on that occasion, Keith wanted to just rip the man’s throat out with his bare teeth. His Galra heritage might explain that reoccurring urge, now that he thinks about it.

“Kolivan, get Pidge where she needs to go. I’ll go with Lotor.”

Kolivan stiffens “Absolutely not. You’re wounded. Lotor could take advantage-”

“Lotor couldn’t get the best of me if my arm was missing. We don’t have time to argue!” Keith jerks his head towards the Flargar’s tendrils, which have begun to move backwards, at least realising their target was beside them rather than stories above.

“What do we do if this doesn’t work?” demands Pidge.

“Tap out. Pile into Greenbean. Find somewhere else.”

Pidge rocks up onto the tips of her toes and puts her face so far into Lotor’s that the foreheads of their helmets clink “Remember what I said, Lootnoot. You hurt my boy and I’ll find you. I’ll bring Hunk’s elbow with me too.”

“Easy, Paladin. I won’t harm a single hair of your friend’s resplendent mullet.”

Putting his back to them, Kolivan takes Pidge by the scruff of her neck and starts to tug her backwards, deeper into the vents.

“Keep your coms on!” she orders.

“Why in the hell would I turn them off?”

Pidge continues shouting even as she disappears into the vents “Remember the time, Keith, you sat on the helmet that’s supposed to be holographically fused to your bodysuit? And you turned off the coms with your butt and we didn’t hear from you for a week? And you didn’t get into contact with us because you thought we were mad and giving you the silent treatment, but it was really just because your ass had switched off the long-distance coms setting? Remember when Shiro rocked up to the Blade HQ asking where they’d put your corpse? That was a fun moment.”

By the time the last echo of her voice is gone, the tendrils have begun to stretch in their direction. Keith fixes Lotor with an evil look and hopes Lotor can feel it behind his mask.

“Well?”

“Do you feel up to running?”

“I’m fine. I can’t feel it.” actually this time that’s a bit more truthful. The tidal wave of adrenaline that has suddenly caught up with him dulls the pain to a low throb in his shoulder. He can still fight- he’s ambidextrous, so really it doesn’t matter if he loses the capacity to move that arm entirely. Even if he loses the use of both of his arms Keith reckons he could fight with his knife between his teeth. 

Lotor sets off at a light jog in the opposite direction to Pidge and Kolivan’s. The tendrils seem to have stretched to their limit- they wave fruitlessly about halfway up the vent as the two round the corner.

“So!” says Lotor “You’re half-Galra! So am I. I suppose you know that?”

Keith swallows a small screech of surprise. He had thought Lotor was either an Altean bleached to what Allura calls a ‘zombie lavender’ by messing around with extradimensional stuff or just a really pale Galra. 

“Yeah, I knew that.” mentally, Keith thanks Shiro for passing on his uncanny ability to tell a whopper of a lie without giving any indication that it is such. Law-abiding and wholesome as Shiro presented himself to the Blade, Keith has watched his brother for eighteen years and knows that man could lie figure-eights around the most practiced of cheating spouses and politicians.   
Lotor’s existence is further troubling because it means Zarkon boned somebody. That means Zarkon genuinely went out and found somebody willing to have sex with him as many times as is necessary for Galra to procreate and created the smug asshole Keith’s following through the vents. Now there is a horrifying prospect.

“I don’t see what that has to do with anything.” says Keith.

Lotor dodges around a pointy bundle on the floor, which Keith does not allow himself to identify as anything but just a messy bundle “I think it could be nice to have someone around of a similar situation as mine. Out of all my generals only Acxa was fully Galra. We spent plenty of time together, of course.” Lotor pauses, and when he speaks again, his voice is a little stiffer “But I haven’t ever met a person with such a violent disconnect with his other culture as you have. I was kept in almost total isolation from Alteans until I was old enough to go out on my own. I wouldn’t have known what the other half of my heritage was were it not for the slurs my father’s upper echelons liked to call me by. And you- well, I don’t know where you were raised. Considering how you turned out I picture it as some kind of barren rock with no civilising influence to speak of. In fact I had a bet going with Acxa that you were raised by Flargars- and that is a delicious piece of irony right there.”

“Do you always talk this much?” snaps Keith.

“What, don’t you chat during life-threatening situations? Is your concentration poor?”

“Um, is yours? Whatever you’re trying to do- lower my guard, or, fucking, make me feel like we’re best friends suddenly, it’s not gonna happen, ok? And where the fuck are you even going?”

“The more Flargars there are, the closer we are to the queen and lieutenant. They’re needy little bastards. They want to stay close to their mother as much as they can. Which of your parents was the Galra, by the way?”

Keith bristles “That is distinctly none of your fucking business.”

Lotor makes a sharp turn. Keith skids on his feet to match him and ends up ramming his injured shoulder into a wall. Back comes the pain. Keith briefly considers collapsing into a weeping ball on the ground. Maybe if he just lays down and cries hard enough the tears will wash away all of his problems.

“Sensitive subject,” Lotor lifts his visor for the express purpose of tossing a sly grin over his shoulder even though the exposure to the atmosphere immediately makes him dizzy. Now it is his turn to bump drunkenly off the walls “Fair enough. I barely knew my mother. I’m sure Allura and Coran don’t talk about it at all, but did you know, for decaphoebs when I was a baby, I was convinced Coran was actually my parent? I’d call him ‘Dad’ in front of Zarkon right up until I was 14 decaphoebs old?”

“I don’t care.” says Keith.  
This is a lie. Keith cares deeply. Anything to help him understand this crazed man leading him through the vents a little bit better. Worse than that, it stings that Allura and Coran wouldn’t trust him enough to divulge what sounds like an incredibly personal history with Lotor. If Lotor had reared pointy-eared head when it was Shiro in Boss Ma’ams cockpit Keith has no doubt Allura would have been tripping over herself to tell Shiro everything she knew.

Maybe she hasn’t quite forgiven him for being a Galra yet. As much as Allura gets along with the Blade and is happy to see that the common Galra are thoroughly mixed with the rest of the universe, there might be a little bit of coldness in her towards them. Or maybe Allura’s complaint is specific to him. 

The sound of the Flargars has not gotten louder so much as it has gotten more intense and multitudinous. When they have to jump across a small fissure in the floor Keith catches a glimpse of a truly mindboggling amount of Flargars crammed into the room below. The roof is much higher in this room and the Flargars are so busy rumbling and jawing amongst themselves they don’t notice their company. Lotor was right about this part at least- they’re getting thicker on the ground.

By now Lotor has to shout to make himself heard over the din “Good news! This is a much smaller hive than the last bunch of Flargars I took on!”

“How can you tell?”

“Can’t you smell it?”

“I don’t know what the fuck I’m smelling right now!”

“A whole lot of Flargars, but far less than I feared- there, can you smell that?” Lotor stops so suddenly that Keith has to go into a baseball slide to avoid knocking the prince flat. “Amniotic fluid. Milk or something. The parent-ish scent.”

Now that he mentions it, Keith is picking up something out of the gamey mess. It’s milky and unmistakably mammalian. Underneath the general shrieking he can also hear a deeper series of grunts and growls. An animal larger than any they have seen before. Lotor stops and motions towards a shaft of light that has punched through a hole in the vents. The queen is unmistakable. Not just because she is by far the heaviest and hugest Flargar – a freight train compared to a fleet of school buses- but because there is a queenly air to her. A certain gravitas to her wobbly movements. Something strange and impossible to pinpoint reminds Keith of a horrifyingly toothy version of Allura.  
The queen has obviously had to crush the walls of a couple of rooms to fit herself into the building comfortably. It is only by the grace of the divine intelligences and some intelligent architecture that the high-ceiling has managed to stay intact at all. There must be a hard-working Gothic-arch somewhere in here holding the whole place together.

On the bright side, it is quite easy to see the way she came because a wide swathe of rubbly destruction is visible off to her side. Though the ground clamours with Flargars, Keith has already determined they could get the queen out. Pretty much the way she came. No significant obstacles. No holes she could get stuck in. In fact Keith can smell a humid breeze coming from the storm outside. It must have just begun to rain over the base because a couple of the Flargars on the outer edges of the gathering are shiny with water. 

Keith looks to Lotor “Obviously, the fat one is the queen. Which one is the lieutenant?”

Lotor shrugs “We won’t know until the queen is dead.”

“Oh. Fuck. Well, how do we make sure there won’t be another lieutenant for the…the former lieutenant if we kill her when she’s the current lieutenant?”

“There’s a process to selecting a lieutenant. The hivemind usually takes a day to determine which of their reproducing females has the qualities best suited to be a lieutenant. We should have no trouble destroying the hivemind within a day.”

“And how will the lieutenant show herself?”

“She’ll try to kill whatever killed her queen.” says Lotor with a grin in his voice “Are you sure you’re up to it?”

“I’m up to it. What about you? You’re covered in Flargar blood. They won’t like that.”

“Exactly.”

It takes a moment for Lotor to find a safe way down to the ground level. The vents around here are damaged badly presumably from the Flargars vomiting tendrils at each other. Thankfully, the din in here is too great for the Flargars to hear them two men thumping around in the ventilation system, even when Lotor puts his knee through a panel and drops it on the rump of a nearby Flargar. Finally they find a panel at the edge of the edges of the crowd. Keith uses his knife to cut the panel soundlessly from its mount. The knife passes through the metal as easily as if he were cutting soap bubbles. Lotor lets out a low whistle of appreciation as he works.

“Quiznak of an initiation present they give you.” 

Keith glowers “I came to the Blade with it.”

“One of those deathbed gifts? Interesting. I would have thought your Galra parent dropped you off right at the Blade’s doorstep.”

Keith hooks his fingers into the grates. The panel comes away in his hands, which he hands to Lotor pseudo-shield “Never knew her.”

“Never knew mine either.” says Lotor “Funny how mothers evaporate like that.”

He slithers through the empty panel and lands lightly, the grate held as a sort of pseudo-shield. The Flargar closest to him twitches and turns to face him. Lotor does something truly stunning then. Rather than running from the churning maw that opens before him he runs at it and leaps right into its face. He alights on the snout and makes another enormous jump to the back of a Flargar many metres away. By now Keith has also lowered himself to the ground. He has the vague idea of drawing fire from Lotor as he runs for the craggy court just outside of the ruined building. For many Flargars he proves too attractive a target to resist.  
The intelligences must be on his side today, because about six Flargars fire their tendrils at him in the same instant. They are instantly and hopelessly snarled. The Flargars writhe and buck against each other, but are still coming for him. A whole knot of them follow him lopsidedly. It keeps getting bigger and bigger- more try to dodge past their distressed fellows with their own tendrils, and end up tangled in the same mess. It’s like watching a bunch of inexperienced yo-yo players trying to out-do each other. Except with teeth the size of Keith’s torso. 

“Shiro’s gonna fucking kill me if he ever finds out about this.” mutters Keith.  
If Shiro discovers the amount of risk Keith really has exposed himself to in the last 48 hours alone he might actually just kill Keith with his own hands to stop the white from spreading any further in his hair. Or worse, he might cry. Keith hasn’t seen Shiro cry since they interred Shika’s ashes in the family plot in Chicago. 

Better not cost Shiro another family member- better survive these next couple of minutes.

Seeing that his pursuers have begun to clog up the way out, Keith slows his pace. The tangled mass of Flargars is bad enough now that he can’t see what Lotor is doing. The fresh commotion might be entirely Keith’s fault or it might be a couple of Flargars squabbling over bits of the rebel prince.   
Keith stops entirely and stoops low, catching his breath and considering his options as the furry, seething mass attempts to advance on him.  
If he could just figure out a way of getting them to turn on each other. They would tear each other to pieces in under a minute. Leave the way clear for Lotor and the queen. But Keith is exhausted. He has slept very little in the last three days and expended a massive amount of energy. Only hours before he almost dashed himself against a shield to free Voltron from a situation they really should not have been in, and since then, he has barely had a moment to stop and think about what he could have done. To himself, sure, but more importantly, to his brother. 

A dizziness overcomes Keith on the spot. He is on his knees before he knows his legs are going to give out, then on his side. Of course his weight falls on the injured shoulder. 

Keith sets to preparing his last words in his head. If he can manage to work his fingers, there’s a switch on his communicator that will allow him to record some last words for Shiro. Something like ‘sorry I fucked up’ or ‘please try not to collapse completely now that I’m dead’ or ‘how does it feel to have a brother disappear on you, Nerdashi’. A sentiment along those lines at least. 

Keith tries to push himself upright. He hasn’t got the strength. He broke, at last, after three days of punishment and close calls with death. The reaper is on their way. Their breath is on Keith’s neck. Interestingly, the breath of the reaper is warm. Very warm. Scalding.  
On second thought that might not be the breath of a metaphorical representation of the expiry of his meat-sack so much as it might be an actual fire, and a lot of fire at that, washing over him, almost embracing him, all without inflicting a bit of damage. Keith is aware of the intense heat to the extent that he has begun to sweat, but it doesn’t burn. In fact it’s more like being submerged just underneath a wave in the surf; a powerful wave sweeping over his head and past him.

Distantly, he can hear the screams of burning things. When it is over Keith turns onto his side. He has to smile when he sees what is behind him. Even with his clouded vision and the sheets of oily smoke fouling the air Keith would know that proud silhouette anywhere.

“Edgy.” 

Not just Edgy. As the storm clears the smoke Keith makes out another figure. There, in sweatpants and a shirt with the words ‘dat boi’ picked out in red letters, Lance perches on Edgy’s jaw.

Lance’s face has never been grimmer “You and me are gonna have some fucking words now.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That ended up being a whopper of a chapter in terms of length. Coming next: this shit gets Klance-y!


	6. A confusing transaction

“Ave Maria, here he comes. Look at that bastard.” 

Hunk turns around to follow Lance’s angry stare, and rolls his eyes when he sees what has set Lance off.

“Cocky bastard. Just ‘cos he’s pretty he thinks he owns the school.”

The cocky bastard, Keith Kogane, has brushed too close to the brick wall of the hallway and got himself stuck on a piece of pre-chewed gum. His face crumples in disgust and horror as he jerks away, strings of damp pink goo trailing off of him.

“Oh yeah. He’s a real smooth bastard.” says Hunk.

Lance tosses a textbook into his locker with more force than necessary “Did you see his score on the simulator? Por Dios. I didn’t even know scores could hit triple figures, did you?”

“Well there are three zeroes on the counter. I mean, people probably don’t get 100% on a regular basis.”

Keith is in the middle of stripping off his gummy jacket when he looks down at his chest and spots something he doesn’t seem to like. Hunk follows his eyes and ends up inadvertently checking out Keith’s infinitesimal breasts. Sullen-faced and abashed, Keith pulls his jacket back on and does the zip all the way up his chin, utterly burying his boobs. The gum dangles off his arm like the tentacles of a long-beached jellyfish. Hunk cringes with sympathy

“Here he comes,” mumbles Lance “Ugh. Look at the way he walks. Look at his stupid hips. Even his hips are arrogant.”

“You know, if Jamal heard you talking about your deadly deadly rival like this he’d probably get jealous.” says Hunk, rooting around his locker.

“What? Why?”

Hunk cocks an eyebrow “Lance, how many times do you think great rivals have criticised each other’s hips?”

Lance starts to sputter “Well excuse me for having an original idea about how to cuss out my rival! But you’ve gotta see it Hunk, look at him!”

“I do, Lance, but not nearly as much as you do.”

Lance is ready to pull out one of his absolutely scorching roasts, but he falls silent as Keith comes within earshot, putting his nose in a textbook as if in serious contemplation. Even so he cannot resist staring at Keith over the spine of his book.

“Hey.” 

Keith looks up and catches the little foil packet Hunk has tossed at him.

“Wet wipe. I use ‘em to clean my reading glasses, but it’ll probably work on gum.”

Keith’s face brightens a little “Oh. Thanks Garret.”

“No problem Kogane. See you in History of Flight.”

As Keith hurries for the bathrooms, Lance lowers his book and stares at Hunk “Henry. Fucking. Tschiyoh. Have you been consorting with my rival?”

Hunk shuts his locker with his shoulder “We sit in the same row for HOF. One time we got paired up in group work.”

Lance starts to shovel everything he needs into his bag “Betrayal! Consorting with him, with the Kaiba to my Yugi. The Sasuke to my Naruto. I cannot believe you.”

“You know I was gonna suggest that you have a normal conversation with him, but after those anime references? I think, maybe, your chances of getting to know him are better if you just pretend you don’t speak any English.”

“Oh my God. And now he makes fun of my proud Cuban identity. Good thing I kept the receipt from the Best Friend Factory. I’m sending you back.”

Hunk pulls Lance into a side-hug “You love me.”

Lance glowers at him “I have literally made more meaningful connections with strangers on buses. I don’t love you and I definitely don’t even fucking like Keith Kogane. I don’t care what you say, Hunk. If I ever have to deal with that guy for more than ten minutes then one of us is gonna walk away and one of us is gonna end up dead and heart-broken.”

“Heart-broken?”

He pummels Hunk’s chest with his fist “Don’t you waggle those perfect brows at me! You know what I mean. He’s a self-assured dick and I hate him.”

“And you’re definitely not projecting your own insecurities onto him in a negative cycle of scapegoating and self-deprecation.” adds Hunk. 

Lance tries to scowl at him, but he cannot hold back a laugh “You’re lucky you’re cute, Hunk.”

 

(About a year and a half later)

“Are you hurt or are you taking a nap?”

Barefoot and shivering, Lance climbs down Edgy’s face and lands on the remnants of the remnants on the launchpad and stalks over to Keith with folded arms. His face is concerned and outraged at the same time- he wants to shout, but he can see that Keith is bleeding badly and obviously in a lot of pain. 

“Edgy! Give me the jacket I left on my chair!” shouts Lance, squatting in front of Keith.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Keith wipes a smear of blood from his lips. Where did that come from? He hopes he didn’t bite his tongue.

Lance glowers “I was waiting for you guys to get into contact when Edgelord lit up all of a sudden and started flying himself out of the hangar. I barely got in him in time,” he gestures down at his thin pyjamas “As you can see. Fuck, it’s freezing out here!”

There is a sound like a hairball being expelled. Lance’s jacket hits him in the back of the head. He quickly drapes it over Keith and helps him to stand, careful to avoid jostling the damaged arm. 

Keith stares past Lance and meets his lion’s eyes “Edge…you shouldn’t have done that.”

Ever since Shiro’s second disappearance, Edgy has made an effort to speak to Keith as well as he can. He does this in a small, growling voice that sounds like the footsteps of a possum on a tin roof to Keith, which startles him badly every time the little rasp starts up at the back of his head. Given that Edgy is not typically given to speech as a form of communication their conversations are limited, directive and often nonsensical.  
Today Edgy is in rare form. His consciousness touches Keith as a little sting at the nape of his neck, and then he hears a madman’s whisper in his mind “...tiny claws and tiny legs. Breathes only carbon. Useless, useless, useless. Must nest.”

Lance continues as if he does not hear Edgy- which he probably doesn’t. Keith hasn’t asked him if he can hear Edgy because he fears what it might do to Lance’s confidence if the other Paladin realises Edgy’s former pilot still talks to him like Keith never left the cockpit.   
“Don’t be so hard on him. He’s just looking out for your ass. Evidently, somebody has to. Where are the others?”

“The others?” Keith stares back into the mess of smoke and smouldering bodies “Oh…oh God, I think Lotor might be-”

“What the quiznak was that?!” the silhouette of a slim figure appears against the smoke. Lotor leaps over a charred body and dashes out of the smoke, coughing through his mask “You could have warned me! Oh, look, there’s another one of you.”

“Why isn’t he handcuffed to something?” says Lance.   
Edgy growls in agreement.

Keith gestures vaguely “There were Flargars. Everywhere. We needed his help.”

Lance squints suspiciously at him “How are you not burned?”

Lotor shrugs “I suppose this suit can take a lot of pounding.”

“You should still be cooked.”

Keith’s stomach twists. The image of Regris hunched over the controls, unmoving and unafraid in her last moments, comes back to him with such force that he has to sit down again. He puts his head in his hands.

“Keith?”

“Just go back to Voltron, Lance. Don’t wait on Pidge. Just go.”

Lance’s eyes burn into the back of his neck “Excuse me?”

Keith raises his head “I said go home. Edgy finished what he came here to do. Unless you got a healing pod in your sweatpants pocket, there’s nothing else for you to do here.”

The cold wind has begun to turn Lance’s lips blue “You want me to just leave you here, bleeding and unarmed on a hostile planet, with an enemy for company?”

“Why not?” says puts in Lotor. He has to shout to be heard, still keeping his distance from Edgy “What do I have to gain from hurting him but the ire of the only other two people on this gods-forsaken moon? I keep telling you people, I’m not going to hurt you because that would be akin to hurting my own chances of survival. By Willow. How many times do I need to say it?”

“You’re not gonna gaslight me into trusting your slimy ass.” says Lance darkly. But Keith can tell he has already decided he must. Lance’s thought process tends to show on his face, step-by-step, when he’s stressed out. Sometimes Keith wonders if he is the only one who has noticed that.

“Go home.” says Keith again.

Lance narrows his eyes “Was that an order?”

“It shouldn’t have to be! I’m not your fucking leader, Lance, that’s my brother’s job.”

“You know what?” Lance stands up “I wanna believe that. I promise you, I want to trust Shiro like you do, but something’s been wrong with him since he got back and you won’t talk about it. Nobody will talk about it. They’re all treating him like glass- like if we challenge him, he’ll be gone again and he’ll never come back this time.”

Keith’s insides ice over at the thought “And what makes you so enlightened?”

“Because I’m Voltron’s fucking impulse control apparently? Because I had to keep you from blowing us up and because you started to trust me to do that- and Shiro doesn’t. Shiro just doesn’t listen to me. That’s normal, but he didn’t really…it wasn’t a question of survival if he didn’t listen to me before. Listen, it’s like he’s not even the same person anymore.”

For effect, Keith also stands up, and regrets it as a dizzying head-rush causes him to sway like a drunkard “You’ve only known him for eight months. And for a month and a half of that he was- I don’t fucking know, in space Alcatraz. So don’t talk like you know what’s normal Shiro and what’s weird Shiro.”

“I’ve known you for eight months.” counters Lance “And I know this isn’t the way you should act.”

Something like panic clenches Keith. A survival instinct, he thinks, spewed up from the most primal parts of his Galra and human halves. The urge to kick and claw and hiss and scratch and run as far from Lance as he can get because this one has seen something- seen a shot for the underbelly, a pale flash of the throat.   
“Really? Do you know me, Lance? Let’s go over what you know. You know I’m a better pilot than you and- and, you’re fucking – a bad shot, and…”

“And?”

What he was going to say has melted on his tongue and dove back down his throat. What comes out instead does so with the minimum of conviction “And fucking annoying, alright? Nobody gives a shit about your skincare routine!”

Lance puts his hands on his hips “Keith, buddy, this is the part where you tell me I really am a seventh wheel and just as useless as I think I am.”

Keith makes a noise not unlike a goose choking on a piece of bread. 

“You really want me to fuck off, so hurt me for my own good, right? Come on. You can do it. Tell me I’m a pointless piece of crap.”

“The only reason we keep you around is because you’re indispensable! Otherwise I’d’ve tossed you and your stupid breath-taking complexion out of an airlock in the first week!” he bursts out.

Lance shakes his head in gloomy wonderment “Keith Kogane, you are a wonder.”

A part of the genuinely horrible things Keith considered saying rockets back up to the top of his throat “And you flirt too much! Just because it has a pulse and its bipedal doesn’t mean you can fuck it! Now fuck off! Your lips are turning blue. You’re gonna get hypothermia or some shit!”

Edgy rumbles in agreement again. He creeps closer to Lance and makes to seize him by the collar, but Lance bats the lion away “Fuck off, manolargo. I’m not finished with him.” he rounds on Keith, his eyes bright and angry “I didn’t ask you to do this, for the record.”

“To do what?”

“To leave Voltron. You were the one who said we needed to stay together. You stopped Pidge from looking for her family the first time- and that was fine, by the way, that was what we needed. But this isn’t what we fucking need. We need the whole team. This shit is getting really serious, Keith, it’s not gonna last much longer. I want you home for this.”

Keith wants to punch him in the arm. He doesn’t know why. He begins to raise his arm to do this, but sees his wound has started to stain through the fabric of Lance’s jacket, and stops.  
“Why?”

“Because you’re a Paladin!”

“You have enough to form Voltron.”

“So?”

“So why do you need me back there?”

“Because you’re a part of this goddamn space family, whether you like it or not.”

Lance does something extremely unexpected then. He leans forwards and kisses Keith full on the mouth. 

Lotor lets out a short honking noise of surprise, somewhere between a laugh and a cry of incredulity. Edgy huffs. He heartily approves of this turn of events. Keith, for his part, does not notice anything going on around them. He feels very little of the pain in his arm- very little of anything but Lance’s shivering body pressed against him. 

Too soon, Lance pushes away. His eyes are stern and angry “Please just come home.”

Then he makes for Edgy at top speed and is scrambling up his snout before Keith can protest.

“Your jacket!” he blurts.

Lance waves dismissively “I’ll get it back when I get you back.” he disappears into Edgy’s jaws and a moment later pops up in the cockpit.   
Keith can hear his muffled voice telling Edgy to turn the heater up. The lion takes flight, turns a tight circle over the complex, and is gone in a blast of hot air and a rev of the engines.

Seconds later, a humming sound fills the air. The purple light of a particle barrier is suddenly rising in into a dome over their heads. As Keith stares at the shrinking red spot of the lion, Lotor sidles up beside him and pats him lightly on his good shoulder, reminding Keith that, yes, he did just watch that deeply personal moment in its totality.

“Does a kiss mean the same thing to you that it does to Alteans and Galra? Because if it does I think you two might be a tad confused about the nature of your relationship.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two important questions arise from this chapter.
> 
> What will Shiro, the numerous Galra and father-figures which are over-invested in Keith's well-being and safety think of this new development between him and Lance? Also, how the hell did Lotor get through that inferno without so much as a sunburn to complain of?
> 
> Tune in next time as these Space Idiots try to figure out what the fuck is going on!


	7. Ringside

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy second day of Hanukkah

Coran is waiting in Edgy’s hangar by the time they dock again. His arms are crossed, his foot tapping on the ground in the picture of impatience.

But all the irritation drains from his face when he sees Lance’s expression. He opens his arms. Obediently, Lance goes over to Coran and lets himself be embraced. Lance’s head thumps into Coran’s shoulder. He squeezes the Altean back.

“Are they dead?” ventures Coran.

“No. They’re fine. Almost set up. Pidge’ll be here soon.” mumbles Lance.

“Ah. Boy troubles, then.”

“I wish I were a Weblum. No Weblum has to think about this kind of shit.”

“Yes, but then you would have to worry about people coming after your scaultrite all the time. Not to mention obnoxious Paladins crawling all over your insides.”

Lance manages a small smile “Ok, you make a valid point.”

“Come on, I’ll make you a cup of one of those leaf-juice concoctions you humans like so much. Think you’ll be able to sleep?”

“For an eon.” says Lance with an enormous yawn. 

 

(The amphitheatre of planet Teg, ringside)

Today is a busy one for the rings. There has already been a tournament of sorts, partly to sweep the prisons of the weaker captives and partly to entertain a troupe of high-ups who are visiting for the day. At the moment, some anonymous Galra tom has been put into the ring and pitted against a couple of monstrous beasts for their entertainment. Acxa has noticed the highest generals and commanders tend to excuse themselves from their work when something goes drastically, irreparably wrong in the war with Voltron. Rather than scrambling to recoup, the authorities have an unfortunate tendency to leave that business to their underlings while they take what they call ‘mental health days’.  
Often this means gathering in the nearest ringside to watch some hapless prisoners murder each other and a selection of the more aggressive flora or fauna from the surrounding systems. That was one thing Acxa really admired Lotor for- he never developed a taste for the ring. It revolted him, he said, to see people being forced to slaughter each other to give a vicarious thrill to some old bastards that hadn’t seen a real battle outside the safety of their control rooms for decaphoebs. 

According to Ezor she had only seen Lotor attend the ringside once on the insistence of his father, and he can be absolved of that because it was to observe the famous Champion in action. Now, of course, the Champion is a part of Voltron. Probably the next time he will set foot ringside will be to liberate the prisoners and let them kill their captors. Acxa doesn’t know if she could resist the temptation to help him do it, should the opportunity arise.

She leans on the railings of one of the uppermost rings of the amphitheatre and watches the battles with a barely concealed sneer of disgust. She and the other two have been waiting for too long already for their contact to turn up. It’s not surprising that he is so late. Acxa has never known him to inconvenience himself for the sake of others.   
At least this is an interesting fight. For about the last fifteen minutes, a mixed-heritage tom has been putting on an absolutely fantastic display of survival instinct and defiance. Half of him is quite obviously Galra. The rest looks to be something aquatic, going by the skinny tail, the webbed digits and the water-breathing device clamped about his neck. For somebody who is essentially on life-support, he isn’t doing a bad job of fighting to the death. 

The tom severs the head off of his aggressor, a Puigian Stomper, with an unnecessary flourish. He promptly scoops up the head, whirls it about in wide circles to build momentum, and lets it fly ringside. A handful of spectators are splashed in blood. The one whose lap the head lands it tosses it back and makes an incredibly rude gesture at the Galra. To the delight of the crowd the tom readily returns the gesture. 

“Is it just me, or does it feel like we’ve fought him before? There was something very familiar about the way he punched that super-drone earlier. How its head popped straight off.” says Ezor.  
The current gladiator has just lain down in the middle of the ring. He seems to be taking advantage of the slight pause between dragging away the corpse and pushing out a fresh opponent to take a nap.

Acxa does not really register what her sister general has said. She is distracted, impressed by the brashness of this tom “I think he’s asleep.”

“He’s damned good at this.” asks Zethrid. She is mesmerised by the tom in the ring.   
It’s only a matter of time before Zethrid suggests that she hops down into the ring and fights the tom, even though they have only just and narrowly avoided execution by this exact ring. 

They always put disgraced commanders or generals to death in Teg’s ring. It’s the ring where the old Paladin Gyrgan was finally killed, so logic dictates that all other deaths with a possibility for the same sort of melodrama has to be conducted on the same soil. Should any of the new Voltron survive their initial capture, Acxa has no doubt at least one or two of them will be put in the ring. They will definitely put the Champion in the ring if Zarkon doesn’t kill him first, and Zarkon has publicly expressed a strong wish to rip the Champion’s head off and use it as a dashboard ornament for his personal battle cruiser.

A fresh beast is pushed into the ring. This one looks to be a Ullipian Yupper with a touch of space-rabies. Acxa squints. Lallia has been telling her for the past couple of lunar cycles that she needs to get her eyes seen to. It may be time to stop putting it off.   
With the air of a tired parent going to tend to their infant, the tom gets up and readies himself for the bout as the foam-spewing Yupper begins to lurch towards him. What happens next, Acxa does not see, because Ezor draws her attention away with a shrill squeal of excitement. A couple of people in the back rows turn and stare at her as she runs to the tom that has just come into the back-aisle. 

“Sendie!” she throws her arms around his neck “You’re up and around already? I thought you’d be in a hover-chair!”

Sendak braces himself with his back-leg “Ezie, there’s every chance you’ll put me in one if you keep tackling me.”

Acxa and Zethrid greet him much more formally. Unlike Ezor, they only know Sendak professionally. Before Ezor was a general for Lotor she was the captain in charge of the security for the lab Sendak used to work in, before unfortunate circumstances caused him to become a toy for Haggar’s mutilating experiments. They have known each other for decaphoebs- the sort of relationship where they would have known the names of each other’s kids and spouses, if either Ezor or Sendak had children or spouses. 

“You saved our asses. Like, really, you saved our asses to an incredible degree. The amount of ass which you saved cannot be over-stated.” says Ezor as she climbs off of him “Honestly? I think the only reason the tribunal is letting us go ahead is because you volunteered to join us. I quiznakking love you for this, Sendie, I really do.”

He makes a dismissive gesture “Anything to get me away from Haggar for a few days.”

Zethrid stretches her arms above her head; they are cramped from having to wait so long “How many bodies is this now?”

“Hmm…seven, I believe.”

With a grin, Ezor pinches his cheek “This is the cutest one by far.”

He brushes her off “This is the same face and body I’ve always worn.”

“The arm is a new one.” Zethrid rolls back one of her sleeves and flexes conspicuously as she pretends to scratch the back of her neck “Looks alright.”

“Alright?” Sendak flexes his prosthetic arm. A mechanical bicep the size of Acxa’s head bulges up “I think it’s superb.”

Zethrid’s face creases with effort. Her bicep strains a little harder, and increases to just a little bigger than Acxa’s head “I mean, you’re not gonna be winning any clone body awards, but it’s alright.”

Acxa clears her throat. Two biceps go flaccid. Zethrid and Sendak lower their arms.

“The reason we came here, Sendak, is to recruit a couple of disgraced authority figures that need a chance to redeem themselves. Haggar trusts you implicitly,” Acxa pauses, quietly marvelling at the words that just came out of her mouth. The idea that Haggar feels anything but disdain for a person is a shocking one to voice. Even a person whom she is directly responsible for maintaining. “So, anybody you vouch for gets a little bit of leeway under her. We’re not exactly going to be a popular task-force. We knew that from the start. Four…three women, two of whom are half Galra, chasing down the prince they lost in the first place. I think we would have had a hard time locating a fighting force if you hadn’t volunteered your own.”

Sendak smiles at her. He tries to make it friendly, but obviously has not had much practice smiling in such a way because it looks like he is about to bite her head off “We all want the same thing. The death of Voltron.”

“A strong empire.” adds Ezor.

“A quick death to her enemies and a long life to Zarkon.” continues Zethrid.

“Eternal may he reign.” finishes Acxa automatically “Anyway, I wondered if you might…ah, swing your considerable weight around for us, just one more time.”

“What do you want?”

“I want the tom in the ring.” 

They have picked an exciting moment to refocus their attention on the tom. Somehow he has gotten astride of the rabid Yupper and has made a sort of battle steed out of it, from which he charges another beast.

“For what? Sex?”

Zethrid snorts. Ezor slaps his flesh arm, scandalised.

“No, for fighting.” says Acxa evenly “Though if you’re interested and he consents, I won’t judge you if that’s what you’re after.”

Sendak manages a more genuine smile this time “Good to know. Let me see what I can do. I’ll have a chat with the ring manager. Lucky you, he owes me a favour.”

He is gone for less than five minutes and when he returns, he is towing a Galra tom with a nervous face and large ears like Sendak’s that suggest they might share some sort of kinship, or at least come from the same general area of New Daibazaal.

“…good idea to take him off your hands, Chalioniz. I thought you were only cleansing the weaker prisoners today but it looks like you’re getting rid of all of your beasts too!” 

Chalioniz lets out an anxious little giggle that sounds more like a sob to Acxa “You’re not wrong.”  
He stops short when he sees the generals, but recovers himself quickly. 

Sendak stares at him “Do you have a problem with the generals?”

“No, no,” blurts Chalionix “I just- you’re such a strong looking bunch. I can’t believe the prince got away from you.”

“Neither can we.” says Zethrid flatly.

But Ezor is annoyed. She has spent far too much time waiting on Sendak in this toxic bath of blood-stink, of hot air thick with screams and death-rattles and racial slurs hurled by the higher-ups every time a captive with some sort of species-diversity appears. Chalionix’s innocent comment pushes the wrong button “Well I hope you’re not suggesting that we let him go on purpose. I don’t know about you, but I love my Emperor, long may he reign. I would never do anything to hurt him.”

Acxa can think of a couple of top-secret sabotage missions that say otherwise, but she keeps her mouth shut.

A hand flutters up to Chalionix’s mouth “Of course I didn’t mean to question-”

“It’s so easy to assume things about mixed-species soldiers, isn’t it? That our loyalty to the empire is somehow less.”

“Not at all! I have plenty of mixed-species friends who are just wonderfully loyal-”

This time, Sendak cuts across him “Don’t mind General Ezor. She’s had a long couple of quintants. Poor thing has spent too long defending herself in front of the tribunal and whatnot. I think she must still be on the defensive.”  
He flashes Ezor a look of warning. She lowers her eyes to the ground. 

“Where did this guy come from?” asks Zethrid.

Chalionix is so glad of the change of subject that his words start to pour out “That’s an interesting story, actually. Would you believe we found him in the wreckage of some ships after a skirmish between Haggar and Voltron? One of the clean-up crews was picking through the wreckage and found this hardy bastard hanging onto a piece of scorched hull. See the water-breathing equipment on his neck? That kept him alive, along with some kind of exo-suit.”

“He wasn’t in uniform?” presses Acxa.

“None that we recognised. I’m afraid the clothes he arrived in have been destroyed.”

Acxa considers telling him off. When an enemy combatant is found in some kind of suspicious uniform, the scavengers that got him have a moral and legal responsibility to preserve the uniform, and if at all possible, transport the prisoner to an authority with the capacity to solve the mystery. This is troubling. The tom could be from anywhere among Voltron’s ever-swelling ranks. An intelligence agent, a pilot, a sleeper agent in the middle of defecting when Voltron clashed with Haggar...then again he can’t be anyone too important, to have been left behind in the skirmish. Voltron’s side tends to make an effort to recover their dead no matter who they are. But if the tom was a general or some other high authority? His corpse would be retrieved at the earliest possible opportunity.

But it’s a risk she is willing to take. For her family’s sake.

“I’ll have him brought up.” says Chalionix. 

The two toms leave together. As soon as Sendak is gone again, the cheerful grin drops from Ezor’s face and she seizes Acxa by the collar, dragging her close “Acxa. What the quiznack? Are you trying to destroy what little credibility we still have? Do you know how lucky we are that Sendak wants to help? We are so lucky- we are so quiznakking lucky, I can’t even tell you! I heard the most disgusting rumours at the tribunal- their novices couldn’t stop talking about how we were going to be split up and used in harems or mating slavery or something awful like that before we even got close to the ring. You know how the empire feels about women with real, solid power like us. I get this is easier for you, with your full Galra heritage, but Zethrid and I are on much thinner ice.”

Acxa peels Ezor’s claw from her collar “I have a lot on the line too, Ezor. Three of my daughters are mixed-species. If the empire decides they really want to punish us they will most certainly extend that to my daughters and their children.”

A flicker of regret crosses Ezor’s face “Listen, I’m not saying you don’t have a stake in this too-”

“You’re saying you don’t trust my judgement.” surmises Acxa. She turns to Zethrid “Anything you want to say?”

Zethrid is not paying attention. The tom has just finished off the rabid Yupper and begun to pelt the lower rungs of the audience with various bits of gore and viscera again. 

“Look at him go. Mad bastard.” she mumbles to herself.

Ezor’s arms fall to her sides “By Willow. Acxa, this is a bad move.”

“We can make it work.”

“We can, but it’s gonna be hard enough to track down the prince already. We don’t need another liability.”

“Ezor, please. Let me have this.”

She squints at Acxa “You don’t actually want him for sex, do you?”

“No!”

“Good. You don’t need to be getting lovers out of the ring. I’ve seen toms throw themselves at your feet for decaphoebs. Plenty of queens too, but you’ve got no interest in queens. Ok, but that’s beside the point. I don’t see why you need to do this.”

“Because. We need strong people on our side. Sendak’s people are fine, but they’re soldiers, Ezor. The way they’ve been trained will have robbed at least half of them of their ability to think independently of the commanding officer. I need someone creative in battle. Someone who answers solely to me.”

Ezor looks defeated “Am I not creative enough for you?”

The resemblance between Ezor and Acxa’s fourth daughter. She and Porrxis are about the same age and have the same colouring. Beyond that they do not look too much like each other until Ezor has been disappointed by something. The way her face crumples inwards, growing sullen and hurt, is identical to the face Porrxis pulls when something isn’t going her way. 

“You are,” says Acxa firmly “But no war has ever been won alone. Please, trust me.”

Ezor sighs deeply “Quiznak. Fine. Go ahead. Get the tom. Sleep with the tom. Teach him the ways of war. I don’t give a shit.”

At this moment, Zethrid suddenly cries out “He’s not finished yet!”

A similar commotion is being raised all across the ringside. The remainder of the tom’s enemies have just been unceremoniously shot, and the tom himself is being carried from the ring. One guard per limb. Even with his movement so restricted, the tom manages to curse and thrash and almost gets a leg free. Then Sendak emerges from the cells that line the ring and excuses the guard, crushing the tom into a bear-hug. 

A couple of moments later the generals have met Sendak in the shadowy backstage of the rings. Beasts pace in pathetically small cages, opposite the captives who have all strategically lowered their eyes to avoid meeting the generals’. Acxa does not look at them either. Her daughters are still fresh on her mind. She feels that she would see their faces everywhere, if she did glance into the cages.

Sendak has had to resort to sitting on the tom to keep him from getting away. With his arms pinned down at his sides and his legs wriggling uselessly beneath Sendak’s girth.

But he stills when Acxa approaches, and cocks his head at an awkward angle to squint at the generals. His eyes are startling orbs of green with flecks of gold scattered from end to end. Acxa is not quite used to judging emotion from eyes which are, to her, so blank, but she can tell the tom is far from happy to see her.

“I know you, don’t I?”

Ezor squats just in front of him, balancing herself with an elbow on Sendak’s knee “That’s what I was saying. Have we fought somewhere?”

“No,” says the tom “I don’t think I would survive a battle with…Lotor’s generals, aren’t you?”

Zethrid glowers “The prince has turned traitor. We don’t serve him anymore. In fact, you’re being recruited for a mission to bring him back into the bosom of the empire.”

“Recruited? That makes it sound like I have a choice.”

“You don’t.” says Sendak.

“How can you be sure you can trust me? If the prince turns traitor, why would you bother trusting some qett you found in the rings?”

“Qett?” repeats Zethrid “Oh. I thought you were a tom.”

“Common mistake. Considering your friend is sitting on me right now, I’ll let it go.”

“Where did you learn to fight like that?” asks Acxa. 

The qett meets her gaze evenly “Why shouldn’t I be able to fight? It’s not easy to be mixed-species under this empire.”

Making a mental note to grill her on that later, Acxa squats beside Ezor “What do we call you?”

The qett pauses. Her face is inscrutable- and not just because it is a little bit alien to Acxa as she says “Antok. My name is Antok.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Now, I think the idea of human gender translating into aliens is dumb, so I always intended to workshop some other sort of gender system for the Galra. I discovered this list in my notes. Apparently I sat up in the middle of the night and wrote it all down, which explains why most of it is nonsense. I'll just paste the notes in verbatim cos they're a wonder to behold 
> 
> Tom- biological binary male, no bio fluidity or affinity towards the female spectrum  
> Queen- biological binary female, no bio fluidity or affinity towards the male spectrum  
> Tem- queen- biologically male, but actually a female (trans woman)  
> Qems- tom- biologically female, but actually a guy (trans man, this is what Keith is, and he keeps going “No, my name is Keith.”)  
> Xes- ascribes to no gender  
> Tes- vacillates all over the gender spectrum   
> Qett- stronger affinity to the female spectrum  
> Tett- stronger affinity to the male spectrum


	8. Cute baby boys

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not the most hard-hitting of chapters. This one is more about getting back into the swing of things after the holidays and catching our breath than it is about intense character development and suchlike. Instead we get childhood photos of the broganes and Shiro has a headache for 8 pages

As is the usual these days, Shiro wakes up with a walloping headache and an increasingly sincere and urgent wish to be dead. For a long moment Shiro remains pinned to his mattress by the headache. The pain in his temples is such that it feels like a couple of screws are being slowly but surely driven into him, skull-bound, and that any moment he’ll hear his cranium crack open to allow the brain matter to slither for freedom. But, as usual, the pain lessens to a gentler throbbing sensation- more like he has recently been punched in the head, than like he is having his brain experimented on by a mad scientist.   
When he is confident he will be able to move without puking, Shiro pushes himself upright. For whatever reason, since he came back from his second round of imprisonment with the empire, he has found it easier to sleep face-down on his stomach. Probably a consequence of having more private space. 

Shiro has been accustomed to sharing his sleeping space for a long time. Sometimes just the room, sometimes the actual bed, but usually only when Keith was fresh from a horror movie or had seen a spider near his own bed. They shared a room for nearly six years at the Garrison. Shiro has not had regular access to a private bedroom from the ages of eighteen to twenty-six. When Christmas and the summers took them back to Chicago, Shiro was free to sprawl as much as he wanted in the bedroom of his teenage years.  
Then there was space. He went from having half a modestly sized room that he shared with a relatively neat teenage boy to a sleeping space with the dimensions of a diving board that he shared with a pair of grown-ass men who could no more keep their stuff organised than they could breathe in the vacuum of space. Up to that point Shiro thought his brother’s night noises were irritating. But his little bit of sleep-talking did not begin to hold a candle to Matt’s brief, brutal night-terrors, and the Commander’s fantastic snoring. More than once Shiro considered tossing himself out of an airlock. At least then he would get a couple of seconds of blissful silence even if it did entail dying directly afterwards.

Shiro slides slowly out of bed. He moves carefully, fearful of stirring his headache again. Already he can feel his lion scratching at the back of his mind. With a yawn, he lets them in.

“Morning.” says Shiro to his wardrobe.

“Do you ever find it odd that humans greet each other by observing the time of day? In this case it isn’t even accurate. We are currently between solar systems, so there is no day-night cycle to be observed. And it’s no longer the morning portion of the day-night cycle of the castle.”

Shiro pulls out a pair of grey trousers and steps into them “Did they let me sleep late again?”

“You clearly needed it. No matter. How are you this…mid-afternoon?”

“I’m fine.” Shiro pulls a white tank over his head.   
This is pretty much the same sort of outfit he wore while he got his two PhDs. The most low-effort, low-maintenance outfit he could think of, but which was still a step-up from the sweatpants and ratty cardigans he feared he would end up wearing if he worked himself too hard. Becoming a defender of the universe also meant reverting to his ‘crazed PhD student’ style of dressing. 

“Your mind feels like thorns today.”

 

Boss Ma’am is fond of those statements. Sometimes Shiro feels like he has an amateur poet living in his head. It’s not an easy thing to have someone who is essentially a small god visiting his head at their leisure, pushing the edges of his consciousness open like a pair of shutters to permit their sheer mental girth. As much as he can Shiro steers clear of touching Boss Ma’ams thoughts. He is pretty sure his little ape brain doesn’t have the capacity to process the weight and scope of what his lion is thinking, except in the diluted drams Boss Ma’am feeds him.

“That’s just my headache.”  
Shiro pads into the bathroom attached to his room, scanning the counter for his toothbrush. He tends to put it in a weird place when he’s exhausted the way he was yesterday.

“Are you sure? It feels thicker. More solid.”

“That’s just my anxiety.”

Boss Ma’am laughs. They say it’s a laugh. The first time Shiro heard it he thought something had blown up in the castle basement. It sounds nothing like the noise they make aloud when something amuses them- and usually that involves somebody tripping over their own feet in the hangar. Boss Ma’am’s sense of humour has been getting progressively more spiteful ever since Keith got into her cockpit. This confuses Shiro because his little brother’s sense of humour revolves around making odd observations that would occur to no one else.   
For example, one summer during their drive back to Chicago Keith tried to point out a moose by the side of the road to Shiro and ended up shouting ‘buff Bambi’. Every now and then Shiro will catch Keith bent double, trembling, his eyes wet from repressed laughter, and hear him mumble ‘buff Bambi’ under his breath. Maybe Boss Ma’am always took this sort of enjoyment from other people’s pain, accidental and hilarious though it is, and Shiro has only just now noticed. Hard to know. 

Shiro plucks his toothbrush out of the Pidge’s glasses case, which has somehow materialised in his space, and speaks around it with difficulty. He could just think what he wants to say to them, but verbal conversation will always be more natural to him “Today I’m thinking we better just go ahead and get to Taujeer. As soon as I’m finished up here I’ll let Coran know to move some of the fleet-”

“Done already.”

Shiro spits into the sink and watches it drain away under the faucet. He is faintly pleased to see no blood. Usually brushing his teeth disturbs a cut on or inside his mouth enough that it opens again, because in spite of his helmet, he seems to have a penchant for getting hit in the mouth. 

“You said it’s done already?”

Boss Ma’am makes an incredibly confusing mental gesture that Shiro translates as a nod.

“Who did it?”

“Lance. He and Edgelord went out on an emergency errand last night. He thought the Taujeerian situation over on the way back here and discussed it with Coran when he was back at the castle. This morning they raised the issue with Allura, and since she’s technically the commanding officer-”

“Emergency errand?”

“Apparently Edgelord sensed Jae-an was in trouble and took it upon himself to go and fish him out of it. Trouble, that is.”

Shiro leans in the doorway of his bathroom. He is not sure what he should do next.

“Is Keith alright?”

“Oh yes, he’s fine, Edgy assured me. I doubt Lance would have left him if he were not alright.”

He takes a deep breath, pushing some hair from his eyes. Then with a speed that surprises himself, Shiro stalks out into the hallway and makes for the bridge, his hands busy pulling his hair into a bun. He’s taken to wearing it like this- quick, easy, gets it out of the way, amuses Pidge and Lance to no end. He has found it is good for making him look serious and occupied, if he’s walking into a room and tying his hair up as he goes. Just what the psychology behind that is he has no idea. Nor does he have any desire to look the gift-Weblum in its cavernous maw. 

Sure enough, as soon as Shiro reaches the bridge the kids and Matt stop talking all at once. He is cheered to see Pidge looks none the worse for having to schlepp Keith, Kolivan and the problematic prince to a monster-infested moon. There is a beat of awed silence which Shiro is not sure if he should enjoy or resent, then everyone is talking again and he can’t pick out a single coherent sentence until Allura leaves the controls and grabs him by the shoulders.

“You look refreshed!”

“No need to flatter me. I’ve already seen my reflection today.”

Allura grins at him “Alright, you look like quiznak.”

He returns the smile “So do you.”

She truly does. Allura might have spent the entire night in a gladiator ring fighting for her life against a selection of the universe’s most horrifying monsters. The rings under her eyes are so deep Shiro imagines he could use them as hammocks.

“You sleep at all?” he asks in a lower voice.

“No, I spent the whole night tossing and turning. I’m not going to lie, Shiro, what happened yesterday was like living out a nightmare for me.” She then turns around and addresses the rest of the bridge loudly, which makes Shiro’s temples twinge again “Now that Shiro’s here I’ll get on with what I need to tell you all.”

Evidently, they have been waiting for some sort of amazing revelation for a long time now. Shiro wonders if he should feel guilty for delaying the team. At least they’re on the way to their next battle. If Allura wants to squeeze in another deep, team-shattering revelation in between these two crises that’s just fine by Shiro, provided he gets to crawl back into bed. 

Instead of laying down for a nap and a cry, Shiro puts a hand on her shoulder “Before that- thanks, Lance, you made a good call. I was on my way to do the exact same thing just now.”

Lance starts like Shiro has just offered him a piece of old roadkill instead of praise. He nods mutely, and shrinks against Hunk’s shoulder. If Allura looks beaten up, then Lance looks positively zombie-like. An extra in a Romero movie. A corpse before its make-over from the mortician. He’s also wearing glasses, which is new. 

“Had to make sure he was alright.” Lance mumbles.

“What? Oh, yes, thanks for saving Keith’s hide too but I meant the thing with Taujeer.”

At this Lance brightens visibly “Oh! Oh. Sure. No pase nada. Group effort on that one. Allura and Coran thought it was a good idea so, so you know.”   
Shiro sees the ghost of a tear in Lance’s eye just before he plants his face in Hunk’s shoulder and mutters something unintelligible in his first language. 

“Allura, floor’s yours.” Shiro gestures for her to begin.

He expects her to mount the steps to the steering column to deliver her speech a little more dramatically, but instead she takes his hand and squeezes it, groping in the air beside her until Coran offers his hand. A memory springs to the front of Shiro’s mind then, powerful and unbidden, of the weekend after his mother’s death. His mother’s church group, besieging the household with gyoza and huge curries and other finger-foods, then without warning, a circle lead by Aunt Hisao closes around him and Keith. With joined hands they begin to pray loudly in Japanese. Keith is overwhelmed and plants his face in Shiro’s middle to cry. Shiro wants to do the same, but he stays shaking on his feet until they are finished.

“Obviously I should have told all of you this a long time ago. The moment Lotor reared his pasty head, in fact, but…but I want to say I couldn’t be sure it was him, I really do. That isn’t true. I knew it was him this entire time. I just didn’t want to face what that meant- what that means. That meant I was fighting someone who was, for all intents and purposes, actually my family.”

The Holts cry out at the same time, overlapping each other in their excitement.

“Whoa! You guys don’t even-”

“Are you kidding me? Like, honorary or womb shar-”

“- look a smidgen like each other except for the white hair I thought plenty of Alteans had white hair is it like a being a red-headed thing-”

“-ing? Is he your long-lost twin? Because I’m not gonna lie that is all kinds of awesome space opera-”

“No! No! Nothing like that! I don’t even understand what you’re saying!” 

Shiro shoots them a look of warning. Pidge and Matt shut up obediently, but are still beaming at each other with glee. Their family’s fondness for space operas and telenovelas is showing through quite strongly at the moment.

Allura takes a deep breath. She starts again, far more calmly “Your species practices a thing called ‘adoption’, does it not? Where a child not naturally of a family is accepted into the fold of family life?”

Lance nods “My youngest sister is adopted.”

“Keith technically is,” says Shiro “My mother adopted him.”

“Your mom?” repeats Pidge curiously.

He shakes his head. 

Allura clears her throat “Good. Because Lotor was essentially adopted by us. By my family. It’s hard to explain- it’s just, our families were much closer before the war. That is to say mine and Lotor’s. I was born before Voltron was built, of course, but my father already considered the people who become the Paladins to be his partners in crime. I mean, the stopping of intergalactic crime. You know what I mean- they were good friends as well as the leaders of diplomatically close powers. So it was only natural that the families should be close as well. For a long time, the Paladins were like an extended family to me. War eventually got into the way- war, diplomatic and domestic responsibilities. But we were always fond of each other. Altea and Daibazaal- the same sort of wedge never really got in between my father and Lotor’s until Zarkon and his sanity parted ways. What I’m getting at is that it was only natural that Lotor should have spent plenty of time around me as he was growing up.”

“You’re gonna have to be more specific, Al. I’m not following you at all.”

Allura clenches her jaw “Sorry Lance. This is difficult to talk about. Lotor’s parents were busy people. Honerva spent his entire life messing around with the meteor and all the extra-dimensional nonsense it brought along with it. Zarkon was a Paladin and the political leader of Daibazaal. It was difficult to make time for his own family. It was the same for my father.” with this, she gives Coran a strange and soft look “But as I said, the Paladins took care of each other as much as they could. When it was more convenient to Lotor’s health for him to stay on Altea, with us, then he did so. He spent the majority of his childhood with Coran and I. It was fine. He got the Altean education that Honerva didn’t deign to give him along with a Galra one from his father- and Zarkon really did try to make time for him.”

“So you’re basically telling us that you consider Lotor a brother?” prompts Lance.

She presses her lips together into a thin line “I suppose I am.”

Coran lets go of Allura’s hand “What we’re most worried about is how he looks now. Lotor is a very common name. It’s an Altean tradition to name your children after dead relatives as well- especially if the namesake is an elder sibling that passed on before they were born. I’m named after an older sister I never met, myself.”

“I’m sorry.” says Hunk in a kind of knee-jerk reaction.

Coran waves dismissively “Hardly one of my bigger worries, lad. And given Lotor’s history of poor health it was natural for us to conclude that he was a different Lotor entirely. Well, perhaps not natural. More comfortable, let’s say. It let me sleep a tad easier at night to think I was fighting a person I hadn’t worn in an infant-sling for three years.”

“Aw, Coran,” Hunk has begun to tear up “I’m so sorry! That’s awful!”

Coran readily accepts a hug from Hunk, and doesn’t complain when the Paladin begins to honk in his ear in an attempt not break down sobbing. Shiro notes that he underestimated how affected Hunk might be by all this high drama. Sure, some of it is just Hunk’s inherent, intense empathy for the pain of people he knows, and another part is probably hysterical exhaustion, but he’s probably crying for his own family as well as Coran’s.   
In his mind, Shiro asks Boss Ma’am to remind him to cheer Hunk up later. Maybe get the kid in the kitchen to take his mind of their troubles when the liberation of Taujeer is finished up.

“Wait, was Lotor sick when you knew him?” asks Lance. The revelation seems to have shaken him from his funk, at least for the moment “Because he’s the picture of health right now.”

Allura shakes her head “No, he’s not. At the moment he has the colouring of a dead Galra.”

“Run that one by us again, Princess.” says Matt.

“Look, Galra features tend to recede in people of mixed-heritage. Children with a Galra parent will tend to look like their other parent or parents. It usually manifests in increased strength or having sharper teeth or better eyes. A sensitivity to the background quintessence interference of the universe, and the like. But one thing that all people who are at least an eight Galra will do is change the colour of their skin when they die. It’s some sort of pack thing- an ancient Galra changed colour when they died to let the rest of their pack know they needed to be disposed of quickly, before it had a chance to spread disease from its corpse in case the smell of death alone wasn’t enough. When a Galra dies, their skin becomes this washed-out lilac colour.”

“Like Lotor.”

“Yes, Lance. Spot on. Lotor is the colour of a dead person.”

“What are we supposed to take away from that?” asks Hunk, still wrapped around Coran.

Allura shrugs helplessly “It could mean any number of things. As soon as things have calmed down a bit on Chornea, I’ll ask Kolivan to see if he can figure out what’s going on with him. One tic, I dug up an old picture of him to show you what I mean.”

Shiro is more surprised by the fact that Allura’s dress has pockets than he is by the photo the team quickly clumps around, or that Alteans even have something as low-tech as printed photos.

The photo shows a harassed-looking Coran with fewer wrinkles and longer hair. Allura is about up to his midsection, perhaps ten or eleven years old, wearing her hair in an adorable halo of curls. Coran has a chubby toddler balanced on his hip. The toddler is an adorable little guy- Shiro would never guess he could grow up to be an intergalactic tool of oppression. He is also wearing a clear circular object over his mouth Shiro takes to be some kind of breathing apparatus or a more advanced version of the masks he himself wears when he has a cold. Whatever pain he might be in the littler version of Lotor is flashing the photographer a sharp-toothed smile.  
The idea of an ill baby is so upsetting that it takes Shiro a moment to realise, yes, Lotor’s skin is an entirely different colour in this photo. Were he a human baby Shiro would have pegged him as a dark-skinned Iranian or maybe a Punjabi person. His hair is jet black in the photo, providing a nice complement to an enormous pair of yellow eyes. Had Allura not told him Lotor and the baby were the same person, Shiro never would have guessed. The resemblance is nil.

Lance’s love for babies immediately overrides his exhaustion and disdain for Lotor “Que guapito!”

“Whoa, he really is weird-looking now.” exclaims Pidge.

“Look at his little markings.” says Hunk.   
The markings he refers to are composed of one thin, solid line that passes across the bridge of Lotor’s nose, not unlike Shiro’s scar, except it continues across his cheeks and disappears down by his earlobes, as well as a spot beneath each eye. 

Truly an adorable little baby. Before Shiro knows what he’s doing his natural, competitive instinct to show off his baby brother has taken over common sense, and he has pulled out his phone and pulled up a gallery of photos labelled ‘Toronto’.

“These are a bunch of photos I pulled off this hard-drive my mother had laying around, the week before I got on the rocket for Kerberos. I got hit by this massive wave of nostalgia. Matt, remember when I made you look at these?”

Matt laughs “’Made me’? I loved seeing all the little Shiro’s. Before you had that goofy mohawk.”

Shiro stops on a photo of Keith playing in the snow. This must have been the first winter they had in Toronto- it’s easy to tell, because Keith was only with them for two winters before his mother decided it was better to move back to America, and during his first one he was dressed in all these ridiculous pink outfits. He hid them during the summer, hid them so well that Shiro’s mother spent the rest of the year trying to find them, right up to September, when she finally caved and supplied Keith with the more gender neutral wardrobe he was asking for. They moved back to the states without ever finding out what became of Keith’s old clothes. At this point Shiro assumes he either buried them in a public park or discovered Narnia and made them Aslan’s problem. 

But in this photo, Keith wears a shockingly pink parka with ‘Snow Princess’ paired with spotty pink boots and frilly mittens. 

The noise which Lance makes reminds Shiro of the time he backed over a squeaky toy which the neighbour’s dog left in their driveway. 

“It’s always weird seeing what your friends looked like before they transitioned.” remarks Hunk with some difficulty, since he is trying very hard not to laugh.

“Who’s that kid in the background?”

Shiro grins at Pidge “That’s me. And yeah, before you ask, I am about to nail Keith in the head with a snowball. I was not a good big brother.”

“I like your use of past tense. Very optimistic.” says Coran.

The kids let out a chorus of ‘ooohs’ and exchange a rowdy round of high-fives. Coran smacks Shiro on the shoulder fondly and, with a touch of guilt, whispers “Sorry. Low blow. I’ll resist the urge next time.”

By now his headache has become almost as bad as it was when he woke up. With a promise to be back soon, he leaves his phone in the kids’ hands and heads back for his room. By the time he gets back there it has become apparent Shiro will need to lie down with the lights out and a puke-bucket beside him for at least half an hour. No matter. It should take at least that long to arrive at Taujeer.

Shiro lays down in his stomach in the darkness. He has only been down for about two minutes when he feels a familiar prickle at the back of his head.

Because his head hurts too much to bother with opening his mouth, Shiro asks Boss Ma’am what they want with his thoughts.

The response comes back so loudly and so clearly it makes Shiro physically cringe in agony.

“I’m going to kill you.”

Uttered calmly. Matter of fact, like someone ordering a coffee. The words are repeated once, twice, three times, each blow impossibly more violent and painful than its predecessor.

And all at once the voice is gone. The headache has gone with it.

Shiro sits up on his mattress. His face is slick with blood from his nose and the corner of his mouth. 

“I don’t think I need to tell you that wasn’t me.” says Boss Ma’am.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Que guapito" loosely translates to "What a little cutie"


	9. “Mostly we complain about your hair and impulse control."

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Keith and Edgelord have a chat. A long chat. Dante Basco is also there, for some reason

Whatever Kolivan is expecting to see when he at last emerges from the depths of the compound, long after Pidge has left with Greenbean and a promise to strangle Lotor with his own intestines if he hurts either Kolivan or Keith, it is obviously not too far off from finding Lotor and Keith standing ankle-deep in the ash of burned Flargars with one of them bleeding from an alarming wound. Lotor has done his best to bind it up with a bit of gauze from the med-kit Pidge left them with, but there’s not much they can do to stop the blood-loss with what’s on hand.   
He ushers the boys inside and guides them back inside the compound. Thanks to Pidge and Kolivan’s busy tinkering, the place is now dimly lit, and the particle barriers have begun to come to life with a series of asthmatic hums that reverberate through the building. Kolivan moves steadily through the compound. While the place is far from intact, his memories of it seem to be, and he is able to guide them through the maze with some confidence. Only once do they backtrack when they come across a section where the hall has been knocked to pieces, presumably by a Flargar charge, and have to find another way across because Kolivan seems to think Keith is far too weak to make the jump. Considering that Keith has been marking their path with a clear trail of blood droplets he’s inclined to agree with Kolivan.

Finally, they arrive in a dusty room that looks like it was either a dormitory or a private medical room. Keith sees a bed and makes a beeline for it, not caring that it has not been lain in for probably longer than he has been alive. He sits on the edge and presents his arm for Kolivan’s scrutiny. 

Kolivan lets out a low growl of anger when he peels the bandage back “I wish you’d be more careful.”

Keith grunts. 

Lotor starts to rummage through a wall of cupboards on Kolivan’s instructions, while Kolivan bares and cleans the wound with a flask of antiseptic. Most of the Blade have utility belts similarly stocked with rudimentary medical supplies, tiny cubes of protein that taste like mothballs and a tiny pill of hysterically deadly poison in case of capture or torture that the victim doesn’t think they will be able to escape. Keith learned the hard way that the flask wasn’t full of water. He has also noticed that extra snacks tend to spawn in his belt. The Blade have warmed to the idea of having a human on the team, though they are still alarmed by Keith’s fatal lack of natural defences.  
Kolivan empties the med-pack within his and Keith’s belts and starts to clear away the blood. The antiseptic burns like hell. Seems to Keith that a species that has been capable of space-flight for what amounts to about 3000 of his years should have figured out how to make a germ-killing substance that doesn’t feel like self-immolating.

But he does not complain as Kolivan dabs the silvery stuff into his wounded skin. Whatever this mercury-looking stuff is, it promotes healing at a rate that Keith is tempted to describe as Wolverine-ish, so Kolivan can slap him around the face with a bottle full of it for all Keith cares. So long as it gets into his flesh and cuts his healing time in half.

“Is this what I’m looking for?” Lotor holds up a case that looks to have been used as a Flargar’s chew toy at some point in the recent past.

“That’ll do.”

“Are you sure it’s not tainted or something?”

“I’ll sterilise it.” Kolivan takes the case from Lotor’s hand and pops it open by jimmying a claw into the seam, then proceeds to dump half of the antiseptic onto the contents before Keith can get a look at what’s about to be poked into him.

Lotor goes back over to the cabinets and practically crawls into one of the ones on the bottom. It must be much deeper than it looks, or Lotor is doing some A-grade acrobatics to contort his body that far into the space “I’m confused. Did the Flargars open up the cabinet, chew gently on the case, then put it neatly back where it belongs?” 

“They’re smart animals.” says Kolivan cryptically.

“Not really, though. When Red and I were fighting them, they tangled themselves up into a knot and couldn’t really move.”

“I meant they’re smart as individual worker drones. When you get them together, the hive mentality decreases the IQ by a startling amount. A little bit like my daughters.” Kolivan allows himself a bitter smile.

Kolivan pulls a long sliver of light from the freshly sterilised case; the Galra version of a surgical needle. Instead of piercing his skin and pulling it together, the needle is run along the edges of his wound to encourage the healthy flesh to stitch itself together back on its own. Essentially strands of healthy skin are going to grow over the wound and pull his skin together while he watches. First time Kolivan used a needle on Keith he didn’t warn him of what was going to happen, and then had the nerve to be surprised when Keith vomited. 

“Don’t call me Red.” mumbles Keith.

Lotor’s head pops out of the cabinet at an impossible angle. He’s got the alien equivalent of a cobweb stuck across the bridge of his nose “Why not?”

“Edgy- Red, Red is a lion. Lance’s lion.” Keith glances down at his wound and sees, not even for the first time today, a bit of his own bone “My name’s Keith.”

Lotor wrinkles his nose like a cat that has just sniffed something disgusting- a very Galra expression “Do I have to call you by that name?”

“What’s wrong with his name?” snaps Kolivan.

“It just sounds a bit-” Lotor shoots back into the cabinet, his voice echoing “-a bit thin, really. More like a sneeze than a name. And considering the amount of time we’ll be obliged to spend together I really would appreciate an alternative to Keith.”

“Jae-an.” says Keith shortly “If you’re so determined to be an edgelord like that and call me a different name, you can use Jae-an.”

“That’s a nice name. How come you don’t use it more often?”

“It’s hard for a lot of people to say. Where the fuck are you right now that it sounds like you went spelunking?”

Lotor’s voice seems to come from the bottom of a deep well “I don’t know what word you were trying to say there. Whatever translation matrix Voltron has installed in you made that last verb come out as ‘perilous hole exploration’.”

“He probably found one of the secret passages.” says Kolivan without raising his eyes from Keith’s arm.

“Why the hell do you have secret passages?”

Kolivan gives him a strange look “To move around secretly.”

Lotor reappears in a puff of dust “Did you say you were raised here?”

“Yes.”

“Do you suppose the ablution facilities might still be up and running? I’ve got an awful lot of blood in my hair, is the thing, and I don’t want it to dry like this. Of course that can wait until after Jae-an is better. Am I saying that right?”

“Little less nasal- oh, God.” Keith makes the mistake of glancing down at his arm and sees a web of healthy skin slowly, wetly stretching over the wound “Ok. Oh God. That is so gross.”

As Keith turns his head away, Kolivan briefly puts his forehead to Keith’s so that the tips of their noses are touching “Never mind. You’ll pull through. You did well today.”  
There’s something in the tone of his voice that tells Keith his shit is wrecked, if he thought he was going to be able to keep his brush with death a secret from him. Of course it is. Wasn’t Kolivan on the radio channel listening to Keith make his ominous goodbye? That makes Matt, Kolivan and Lotor who know. Keith doesn’t trust a single one of them to keep his secret.

Matt would feel obliged to tell Shiro out of the bond of older-brother solidarity. Kolivan and Shiro have some kind of weird co-parenting dealing forged behind Keith’s back and working largely over his head. Given that he is eighteen goddamn years old, nearly nineteen, and led a passable independent life for a year and a bit after Shiro evaporated into the cosmos, he isn’t too happy about that. It’s probably better that he tell Shiro before Kolivan gets the chance.  
And Lotor? Keith doesn’t know what he thinks of Lotor yet. Just that it is safer not to trust him for the time being.

Kolivan gets up and starts to re-order the med pack “For the moment we’re going to assume all of the Flargars are in that ash-heap up on the surface level. I think we would have already been attacked if there were anymore lingering in the building. The particle barriers will protect us from herds looking for new territory or trying to come and help for tonight, but we’ll have to establish ourselves in the area sooner or later. Tomorrow, if it’s at all possible.”

“Establish ourselves?” echoes Keith.

Lotor brushes the cobweb from his hair, grimacing in disgust at the yellow powder that also comes away on his fingers “I suppose you mean making a bit of a fuss. Screaming. Puffing our chests out. Pissing up a tree to mark the boundaries of the territory and all that.”

“That does not come close to what I mean. Killing a few of their advance troops is what I meant.”

Lotor opens his mouth to retort, but whatever he says to Kolivan is completely lost to Keith. His senses finally give out on him. His eyes go dark, his ears go deaf and his consciousness just snaps like a rubber-band stretched back too far. Just before this last and part happens he is aware of an explosion of pain in his shoulder as he slides to the ground and catches his full body weight upon the wound.  
His final thought before he loses himself completely is, strangely, a triumphant one. 

Yes, he thinks, must nap.

 

What happens next has only happened to him twice before. The first time, Keith was convinced he was just having a strange dream in incredible detail. It was only after he rose, stretched the kinks out of his back and found that his recollection of the dream was not so much as smeared by the dream-amnesia that usually claimed his nightly adventures two or three minutes after he moved that he began to think there might have been some level of reality in what he had just experienced. The second time it was a far more urgent, frightening thing.  
This was when he had moved from Edgy to Boss Ma’am, forced from his lion by Shiro’s second accidental sabbatical. All things considered it was a bad time for Keith. He thought his brother was dead and, with the new burden of directing the team as well as acting as a member of a crippled Voltron, had little time to look for him. During one of his thin and troubled sleeps, Edgy took it upon himself to visit again. 

The experience is so damn disorientating it makes Keith sick to his stomach in such a way that he can actually feel it through his sleep. To his mind, Edgy is a god. A small god, perhaps, of modest power, who requires no sort of regular worship beyond a chin-scratching if he feels he should be congratulated for a job well done. A god nonetheless. A creature more vast than Keith can imagine, in the scope of his thoughts and the breadth of his experience.  
Yet, to communicate with Keith, he chose one of the most petty and simple forms available in the multiverse: human. 

The same form he’s wearing at the moment. He has changed his clothes by combing through Keith’s memories to gauge how he should prevent himself. Last time they met he called himself a ‘human cosplayer’ to make Keith laugh. 

It makes Keith laugh right now “Holy shit. You look terrible.”

Edgy grins at him over the collar of his parka. What he has on today is a huge blue parka over a red and blue flannel that was a hand-me-down from Shiro. Then, God, the tight black jeans that made Keith’s legs look good, but made it hard to sit down or get comfortable in any way because he was constantly worried his hips might bust out of them. Jeans for dudes aren’t made with the plight of transmen trying to accommodate larger hips taken into account. At least, not Chicago. This outfit is something 15-year-old Keith would have quite happily worn.

“I think I look adorable.” says Edgy with the conviction of a man too blinded by love to accept the reality.

“Is that my fucking pentagram pendant? Edge, no, you cannot. I had no idea what I was wearing. I only put it on because I watched the ‘The Craft’ and I thought I was a wicca for, like, the three worst weeks of Shiro’s life.”

“I think you’ve told me the story. You burned sage?”

“Until we found out Shiro is super-allergic to sage.”

“No, not me then,” Edgy takes a seat beside Keith on the bench and slings an arm around his shoulder “I think that must have been all of us. Oh, I’ve got it! We were fighting that robo-beast thing over in Little Unilu. Shiro used it as an incentive to get to the end of the day, didn’t he? It was something like ‘If we survive this I’ll tell y’all about the time Keith thought he was a witch and poisoned me’.”

Whether this is a dream, a memory or both, Keith is not sure. He recognises the park around them as the one across the street from the house in Chicago. His room had a view of it, so whenever he looked up from his homework or a book, he was watching children egg each other onto the monkey bars or go down the slide face-first or argue over whose turn it was to use the only adult-sized swing on offer. One night, when Matt had come up to Chicago for some sort of bureaucratic thing relating to the mission, Keith saw him and Shiro running about the merry-go-round like a pair of kids, rather than a pair of astronauts in their twenties.  
He and Edgy sit on a bench at the edge of the woodchips that surround the equipment. Even though there is snow on the ground and a grey sky that threatens more, the stuff is covered in kids who are, likewise, covered in cold-weather gear. Their faces are all vague and half-featureless in the way of half-remembered people. Keith scans the shrieking crowd for a glimpse of the purple parka he wore from 10 to 13, but cannot see himself. No sign of Shiro either. So maybe this is a closer look at a memory he has of watching the park? Then again, he is also relatively certain that Dante Basco was never in the park, and the man is in here bogarting the big swing, refusing to relinquish it to the little girl who demands it in a nasal whine.

Yawning, Keith rests his head on Edgy’s shoulder “You’re not cold in that?”

“No. Should I be?”

“It’s not really enough cover for this kind of weather.”

Edgy squints curiously up at the sky “So snow is cold on your planet as well? That’s so strange. Where I came from, before I ever heard of Voltron, snow was a sign that the weather was going to be blisteringly hot.”

“Edgy, I’m glad to see you. I was glad to see you today, but you can’t do that to Lance.”

Edgy frowns “Do what?”

“Tear off like that. You shouldn’t do that to Voltron and you shouldn’t do that to Lance.”

“You needed help.” 

Keith straightens up and takes his hands out of his pockets “Maybe so, but I had people with me who would have helped. A person. I guess. I don’t know what Lotor’s gonna do. I just need to know you’re gonna be reliable.”

“Reliable,” Edgy nods stiffly. It is obvious the gesture is not natural to him “I am.”

“Not for me. I need you to be reliable for Lance. I need to know that you’re just gonna put your head down and do your job. Not as my- my…” is there a word for what Edgy is to Keith? He’s half best friend, half soul-mate. Someone who understands Keith deeply, implicitly. In a way Keith is terrified no one else will ever want to know him “… my cat. Be Lance’s cat for now. Do what you do for me, but do it for Lance.”

“Can I not do it for both of you?”

“I’m not saying don’t be my cat anymore! I’m just saying you can’t just, fucking, barrel out of the castle the first time I get stabbed and you’re not already there to torch whatever did it.” Keith stands up and brushes off the seat of his pants “Let’s take a walk. My legs are getting stiff.”

“You’re probably sleeping in a weird position.”

Keith links his arm through Edgy’s. To the rest of the dream they might as well be leaves passing in the wind. Dante Basco doesn’t even raise his head as they walk around the swing-set, reaching a thin path that winds off into a deciduous glen. His thick jacket and lining melt into a thinner t-shirt and shorts. His chest seems to inflate a little bit and, looking down, he sees he’s wearing a sports bra instead of a binder. Keith plucks at the elastic. He lost this bra when he moved into the desert permanently. It disappeared into the recesses of the ancient washing machine behind the house or was stolen by a coyote. One of life’s great mysteries.  
Now Edgy looks more like Shiro, in some black overalls and a baggy grey cardigan to keep out the autumn chill. On Shiro it was the kind of outfit that caused people to double-take and stare with appreciation. More than one fashion blogger took a surreptitious photo of him. Keith was always tempted to stop them and tell them how Shiro normally wore yoga pants and cardigans too ugly to be beheld by most mortal eyes. Shiro’s clothes look fine on Edgy. Certainly he doesn’t look like a model, but Keith can chalk that up to the fact that Edgy doesn’t really know how to wear a human face more than because Edgy isn’t attractive. 

After a long couple of silent moments, Edgy ventures “Is this the woods behind the Garrison?”

Keith lets out a sigh “I think it must be. Shiro and I used to hike out here when he got too stiff. We thought it was fucking weird that we were in the desert and there was just a forest out here, not even natural vegetation, just a…I don’t know, looks like a piece of the Smokies back here. But I guess that’s what you get when you let a bunch of mad scientists lose on a desert with rudimentary terraforming tech to experiment with. That’s what Pidge’s mom does y’know.”

Edgy frowns “Greenbean told me Pidge’s mother was a goddess of the earth.”

“Nah, she fake-terraforms the desert behind the Garrison. Matt says her dream is to create a kind of grass that can scream when it gets mowed.”

“Why would anyone want to do that?”

“Ask Colleen Holt.”

“Are you mad at me?”  
The face Edgy has is definitely a young adult’s, but his expression is that of a wary child. 

Keith stares in front of him. They’re walking through an autumn day now. He casts his mind back, trying to remember which day this was, if he was on his own or with Shiro, and cannot for the life of him come up with a satisfactory answer. 

“I’m not mad at you. I just…I just wish things were different.”

“Different how? Different in that you wish you stayed in the castle?” Edgy reaches up and snatches an orange leaf out of the air. Crushing it in his fist, he inspects the crumbs with interest.

“I wasn’t being a good Paladin.”

“You weren’t being a Paladin at all.” Edgy looks exhausted, brushing the leaf’s crumbs onto the leg of his overalls.

“There were enough to go around.”

“You don’t need to spare Lance like that. He can handle it.”

“But he shouldn’t have to.” Keith ducks a branch, holding it out of the way for Edgy “Part of the reason I left the castle is because I had other places to be. I could just go off with the Blade. Lance doesn’t have anything else like that. If I take being a Paladin away from him then what does he have to keep him going? Maybe I’m treating him like glass but I think you’re expecting way too much internal strength from him. He’s not like I am, Edge, he didn’t have to take care of himself before this. He has a huge family. A huge support network. Now he’s trapped up in a space in the middle of a hell-battle and when he’s not being forced to fight for his life in a giant robot made out of cats, then his crippling insecurity is eating him alive. Or both things are happening at the same time.”

Edgy stares at him “Keith.”

“What?”

“Does Lance know you’re in love with him?”

Keith makes a choking sound at the back of his throat “Oh, fuck off! I like him, alright? I’m not exactly gonna get down on one knee! Eight months is too soon to be in love with somebody anyway.”

“What about us.”

He gestures helplessly “You’re different! You’re a giant space-cat that can speak to me telepathically. Why do you sound so weird when you’re not, like, directly in my head, by the way?”

“It’s a little harder to speak in words for me than it is for you. Unless I’ve crawled directly into your head like I’m doing right now. Too much of that strains the brain. If we did this all the time, you’d be getting nosebleeds and terrible headaches.”

“Do you think you could do this for Lance?”

They pause at the edge of a sharper drop in the trail. Keith hops down first, then offers Edgy a hand to help him. Forget feline grace; Edgy has no idea what he’s doing with a human body, and it shows whenever a little more than the bare minimum of dexterity is required of him. Edgy ends up squatting, clinging to Keith and ultimately wrapping himself about his Paladin entirely to get off the tiny ledge, and has to be coaxed to put his feet on solid ground again.

“You want me to crawl into Lance’s brain?” pants Edgy “Ok, but I’m still not too good with my Spanish and he mostly thinks in that.”

“You picked up Japanese and Korean from me pretty fast, not to mention English.”

Edgy gives him a pitying look “That’s because we’re Paladin and lion. No matter how many other people pilot me, I know it was you that I was awoken to be with. That’s why we worked so well together. Don’t you ever wonder why you became so proficient at using swords so quickly? Quick enough that the moment you faced your first real battle you were able to use your bayard so effectively? Knives, fine, you’ve always been good with knives, but swords are entirely different matter.”

“They’re basically just long knives.”

Groaning, Edgy mimics the forehead-slapping gesture he’s seen Hunk do a billion times when some recalcitrant machine starts to spit sparks at him “Why are you like this?”

“I’m not saying you’re wrong,” Keith grins “I’m just saying, I think the whole cult that surrounds swords is just as stupid and unwieldy as swords are as weapons.”

Edgy grows serious again “You know, sometimes I doubt Lance was meant to be a Paladin at all.”

Cold dread knots in Keith’s insides. He steps smartly over a rock and pauses, having reached a crest in the trail. The thinning of the trees suggests he should be getting some sort of fantastic view of the Garrison desert, but instead it is the same distant view of the playground he got from his window in Chicago. Snow, children bedecked in winter clothes, framed by the burnt-coloured branches of a forest in fall.   
Edgy stops beside him and seems to appreciate the view as well. He winds an arm around Keith’s back and makes a soft noise that could be the beginnings of a purr.

“You can’t just say shit like that.”

Edgy looks down at him “Why not?”

“Imagine how Lance would feel if you said that.”

“I know how he’d feel. Awful, worthless- which, by the way, he feels most of the time. I should know. Our neural connection is so weak that I only get the strongest of his sensations from it and the only time I’ve ever had a positive signal come from him was last week when he found a pack of gum in one of the jackets he never wears.” Edgy sighs “To be honest, it’s a little bit exhausting to be around. I know he can’t help it. But I wish it weren’t my job to listen to it all of the time. Poor Guapa, having to listen to his self-degradation every day. I don’t know how she put up with it since she’s so empathetic. I mean, so am I, but Guapa practically absorbs the emotions of other people.”

Keith is torn between wanting to hug his lion and wanting to whack him in the head. The two meet somewhere in the middle, leaving still and stiff at Edgy’s side.

Edgy probably knows this is a sign that he should shut up. He presses on anyway “We were talking yesterday. I was talking in the context of how it was to be Lance’s lion before, when we thought he was going to be hers permanently, and she mentioned that Lance took quite a while to figure out how to most effectively utilise his bayard even with her help. Remember the time you cradled him in your arms?”

“Always.” mumbles Keith.

“Yes, well, shortly before that he shot Sendak’s arm off in what we lions call ‘Lance’s first moment of competence’.”

“You’re a gossipy bunch of bitches, huh?” says Keith irritably “I’d hate to hear the things you guys say about me behind my back.”

“Mostly we complain about your hair and impulse control. In fact Kitty swears the two problems are related. But back to Lance- it’s only recently that he’s figured out how to best use his bayard, and that happened since he left Guapa for me. It’s making Guapa feel like a royal failure. She’s always asking me what Lance and I are doing different that allowed him to unlock a little more of his potential. I’ve got no idea what to say to her. The boy gets into my cockpit and suddenly his gun is a sniper rifle with proper scopes and amazing accuracy. Even his flying has gotten better. Should I tell him that?”

“Tell him none of those things!” Keith throws his hands up “For fuck’s sake, Edgelord! You’re supposed to be supportive! Encouraging! What is wrong with you?”

Edgy reels back a bit at the severity of Keith’s reaction.  
“I’m being honest! It’s not that I don’t like him! I think Lance is incredible, especially since he’s had such challenges to overcome, like the sort of flying skill-set he came in with.”

“There’s a difference between being honest and being blunt and assholish! Jesus, wow, I am so glad you came to see me, because if you uttered one word of what you just told me about Lance to Lance’s face- brain- whatever, I think he might shoot himself. Wow. Ok. Look, I’m gonna give you a basic guideline: just be kind. If Lance needs some comfort, give him some unconditional comfort. No bonuses. Just some good, pure, kitty comfort. And if he asks for criticism? Give him constructive fucking feedback. Don’t just, fucking, rail on him, ok? I understand you’ve got one hell of an ego, Edge, you could listen to people bitch about you all day and come away without a single mental scar, and I’m the kind of person who’s so- so-”

“Distant. Calculatedly distant.” finishes Edgelord.

“Yeah, that, so that it doesn’t really hurt me when people get on my case-”

“Keith, if you were anymore terrified of rejection you would have had a stress-induced stroke by now.”

“Focus! One thing at a time! Look, with Lance? Just be good to him. He trash-talks himself enough as it is. Maybe one day he’ll need, he’ll be able to stand more, uh, ruthless criticisms from you, but for now you’ve just gotta be a loyal lion. Stay with him. Don’t come to me no matter what’s happening. Do your job and if all goes well I can be back at the castle sooner rather than later. But Voltron can’t fight this war with you jetting off all the time. We saw that pretty damn clearly when we were trying to Voltron and find Shiro at the same time. This is just how it’s gonna have to be.”

“Fine!” Edgy throws his own hands up, but leaves them hanging there like he’s getting ready to climb an invisible ladder “I’ll be a good kitty!”

“Great! Now never call yourself a ‘good kitty’ again or I will leave Voltron and I’ll never look back.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter will be the last one for a little bit. I'm about to go off and visit some family in an area where I won't have access to wifi, but I've got a couple successive chapters almost done up already. That way when I get back I can post one or two chapters in quick succession. Sorry to leave it dangling on a dialogue-heavy chapter. I think the most we accomplished in this chapter was establishing that Keith's crush on Lance could eclipse the damn sun and Edgelord doesn't understand human emotional conventions.
> 
> The next couple of chapters will deal with more Lotor-centered things as well. We're 9 chapters in and so far all Lotor has done is be aloof, cold and have good hair. Had to get all the pieces set up. Now we knock a few of 'em down.


	10. Taujeer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This one's a dark one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whew boy. Jet-lag, sudden change from cold to intense heat, general nausea from moving myself into a new room in said intense heat and humidity. I may have died at some point during writing this chapter.

The mornings on Chornea, as Lotor discovers, are a violent affair. Daylight’s creeping return somehow provokes the ever-present storm-clouds into unleashing an absolute barrage of lightning. With the particle barriers standing strong, Lotor feels secure in sitting on the remains of the complex’s roof and enjoy the light show. Lightning pummels the forest and ground with a vengeance. Treetops explode and send shrapnel for dozens of metres in every direction. Each and every hilltop and peak is scorched grey or smoulders. Even out at the distant ocean he sees innumerable strikes hit the surface of the water. He wonders if the weather might not be in some way sentient. During the short phoebs of his exile he visited a planet where its dead residents would literally go up into the sky, fuse with the weather and exact vengeance for the lose ends and grudges they had left on terra firma.   
If this is a similar situation Lotor would assume there’s a whole lot of angry rebel doctors, nurses and soldiers that were being treated when they died, just swirling in a vortex of rage over his head. Ok, so none of them would really know to hate him. Given that Kolivan was raised here the casualties must have died off before Lotor was ever stirred from his long sleep. And because this is a rebellion base the place would have been overrun by kids who looked like him- Galra, mixed with every other combination the universe has to offer.

Then again, the weather is probably not sentient. Chornea must just be one of the planets that seems to loathe its own existence and is doing its best to remove itself from the universe. Once Lotor would have said he could sympathise. 

To his disappointment the light-show only lasts about twenty minutes. After that whatever chemical, physical or emotional disturbance the sunlight caused in the clouds balances out. The sky becomes a dark roiling mass again. Lotor rubs his sore retinas and sits up. He’s a little stiff from laying on his back for twenty minutes and, of course, from being killed twice yesterday.   
Yawning, Lotor gets to his feet and stretches out until his spine has loosened a bit, then kicks a leg back, grabs his ankle over his shoulder, and bends at the hips until the crown of his head is pointed towards the ground. He’s sore in many places- an inevitable symptom of dying. On the up side, the two deaths proved that his healing ability is still robust and up for the abuse Lotor will probably have to subject it to now that he’s with Voltron. And for all the times Lotor has nearly burned to death, either in battle or because he needed to fly into the face of a sun to keep from being kidnapped, it has never actually killed him before.

Then again he has never before been charbroiled by the fire of a lion of Voltron. At some level it is comforting to know that a death by flash-fire is not intrinsically painful. There was one second of confusion, one second of intense heat as the fire consumed him and then he was dead. About a minute later when he got up, all Lotor had to do was get up and wonder why in the hell his healing factor extended to whatever he was wearing. Narti once hypothesised that Lotor might be returning to some default physical prime rather than healing; the quintessence running thick in his veins keeping its host healthy and fit, even if doing so requires slapping the universal laws of life and death in the face with a turbo-shovel. 

Lotor switches legs and stretches deeper. He is disturbed to find himself tremble a little with the effort of maintaining his balance. So what if the last couple of days have been almost comically traumatic? Lotor’s life since waking up has been the same sort of nonsense, so why should it catch up to him now?

“Enjoying yourself, boy?”

Lotor straightens up just enough to see a pair of boots in front of him. The spacing suggests Kolivan has struck an imposing stance, so Lotor bends the leg beneath him and pops his forehead on the ground, making as much of a show about not being bothered as he possibly can.

“That was quite an impressive morning chorus. Is it always like that around here?”

“Stand up.”

Lotor straightens up languidly and stretches his arms over his head “I hope you’re not here to accuse me of smothering Jae-an in his sleep.”

Kolivan narrows his eyes “He’s fine.”  
Then, to Lotor’s surprise, he holds out Lotor’s sword. He must have brought Lotor’s weapon all the way from the castle. How did he do that without Lotor noticing? More importantly, was his ulitilty belt big enough to fit a weapon the size of Lotor’s fore-arm in there, or is the man equipped with some dangerously large pockets?

Hesitantly, Lotor grasps the hilt of his sword. Kolivan has presented it to him unsheathed, holding it by the tip of the blade. Traditionally, this particular method of exchanging weapons is a sign or a request that trust is established between the two parties, since Lotor could quite easily drive his sword into Kolivan’s guts. Then again Kolivan seems to have the kind of abs that would break Lotor’s sword if he tried.   
Lotor takes the sword from Kolivan and holds it down at his side. An incredibly inconvenient striking posture, should Kolivan decide to attack him. For a long moment the two men regard each other without breaking eye-contact. 

Then Kolivan reaches for the knife on his hip “I’ll stop when one of us has drawn blood.”

 

Taujeer, at first glance, is an extremely arid and unliveable planet on its surface, which has forced its few hardy residents to gather up on faces of cliffs and or the tops of mountains to have a hope of successful crop-growing. At second glance, the planet’s surface is in fact teeming with life. Unfortunately all of this life happens to be enormous, aggressive and bloodthirsty, which is why the smarter species have had to gather on higher ground to avoid being eaten. This doesn’t make for very good warfare considering almost every single major population centre is exposed to both the elements and an enemy attack. Taujeer is a civilization that had its most recent blossoming under Galra rule (in spite of Galra rule, the locals insist) and thusly did not have to worry about anything but getting the hell out of the way of the immense predators on the ground. Until they decided to join the Coalition.

As per usual, Shiro and Allura share the coms and are somehow managing to direct the Coalition fleet while also steering their respective parts of a giant cat robot.

“Shield 2 and 4, tighten up the formation. You’re leaving too big a gap.” says Shiro as he aims the shoulder-cannon at a charging group of drones.

“Infantry 12, give cover to sector 13! The transport is full and it needs some cover.” says Allura, independently moving Voltron so that she pivots on her heel and is able to dodge a volley of fire from a heavy-duty blaster almost a mile off “We should take care of that thing.”

“Bayard, Lance! Please!” 

A second later Voltron’s swapped its cannon for the sword.

“Y’know,” Lance cocks Edgy back, the sword raised “For a couple of comemierdas who slapped each other in the face the last time you tried to high-five, you guys are coordinating this well.”  
Lance tosses the massive sword straight and true. It pierces the particle barrier about the blaster and skewers the ship, spear-like. Lance flicks a switch to activate the magnets in his palm and the one in the sword’s hilt responds, shooting towards him hilt-first like the world’s hugest javelin.

He catches it smoothly, then swats a drone out of the air as if going for a baseball. The drone careens past them and explodes in unison with the skewered blaster.

“Dude. Dude.” this is Hunk, urgent down in his leg “You just threw that thing like a lance. And your name is Lance. Illuminati, much?”

“Illuminati!” bellows Pidge in agreement as she sucker-punches one of the enemy shield ships into the distance.

“Shield 5, defend the citadel. No, not that. That’s not the citadel. That’s – which one of you quiznakkers is piloting that thing? Is it Rolo? For fuck’s sake, Rolo! In what universe does ‘defend the citadel’ mean ‘defend an over-sized cactus that in no way looks like the citadel’? Well wear your damn glasses then!”  
There is a sound in Shiro’s cockpit which might be him bonking his head on the dashboard, as he is wont to do in times of extreme stress and/or incompetence.

Rolo gets his act together and closes a gap in front of the citadel, narrowly beating out another giant blast from yet another gunner. The blast springs off the shield ship and goes back the way it came. Galra ships are a bit defter than what the Coalition has on hand, though, and it dodges the projectile easily. This pisses Hunk off.

“Take it down with your lance, Lance!” he demands in the same thunderous voice he uses to warn cereal-burning Pidge out of his kitchen.

“Yessir.”

Once again Lance’s aim is true and swift. All those years of being made to play as his older sister’s hapless opponent in volleyball have given him an impeccable aim. That, and a nearly psychotic fear that he might be struck repeatedly in the face by that cruel ball of packed leather and plastic, every time he passes a beach or a woman with the same cloudy mass of black curls as Flores-Irena. 

The horizon grows dark; so many ships, the sun is practically blotted out to a smear of light, like a lightbulb covered in the carapaces of many cockroaches.  
Shiro lets out a growl of frustration “Goddamit, goddamit. More of them are coming.”

“Where are they all coming from?” cries out Allura. 

The third or fifth wave of gunners (at this point it’s become difficult to distinguish fresh attacks from the stragglers of a latter catching up) pours over the sandy horizon. More soldiers, more ammunition, from the Galra’s apparently infinite supply, while the Coalition have a handful of shield ships, half an infantry working to evacuate the citadel, half being gradually shot from the sky by superior numbers, and a bunch of pissed off Paladins steering a robot cat. Said robot cat has performed admirably today, but it is obvious that she is far out-gunned and out-matched by the onslaught.

“This is a mop-up now,” says Lance over his private connection to Allura “We’ve lost the citadel. Let ‘em go in and take what they want, as soon as we get the Taujeer people moved.”

A fist strikes her dashboard “I thought we had this one. One damn citadel.”

The sword flies back into Lance’s palm “No pase nada, cielo. It’s the people we need to save, not the buildings.”

Shiro breaks in on the group channel “We can barely cover the city with what we’ve got. What do you think, princess? Do we fill the gap ourselves or finish the evac?”

“If we finish the evac ourselves, that’s going to leave the shield ships unguarded.” she snaps. The anger isn’t directed at Shiro. It’s just a general anger at the universe, at the empire, for jamming her into these shitty situations. 

“There are more ships.” says Lance.

Out comes the cannon again. Voltron perches on the edge of the mesa under which the citadel is built, takes a knee, and begins firing over the tops of the shield ships. 

“Listen,” his voice is strained in concentration; he is helping Hunk with the long-distance shots through a joint sights “There are something like 2700 people still in the citadel. All together there are 19 people staffing the shields, people who asked to be in this mess, unlike the Taujeer. We may be resource poor, but we can make up for the loss of six shields if we have to.”

“Just what the fuck are you suggesting, Lance?”

“Don’t cuss at me, Shiro. I didn’t start the war. I’m just fucking fighting it.” 

 

Kolivan hits hard. Just how hard he is capable of hitting with a single dagger would surprise Lotor, if Lotor had not spent the majority of his life taking on people much larger and more powerful than himself, and developing one of his many fighting styles specifically designed to use that natural advantage against them. When Kolivan comes straight for the crown of his head, intending to knock him to the ground and hold him there, Lotor darts to his left. Much as Lotor would like to believe it he doubts the unsheathed sword is permission to attack Kolivan as if trying to kill him.  
So instead of cutting Kolivan’s legs off at the knees Lotor whacks him sharply in the back of the knee. Belatedly he realises there is entirely too much padding in that spot for Kolivan to have even felt a sting. Kolivan’s elbow comes down on his back with a promising crunch. Lotor forces himself not to cry out. He tucks his head in and rolls as far as his momentum will take him. 

The idea of this fighting style is to get his opponents to run at him. Makes a little more time for Lotor to plan out his next move. And, scanning Kolivan from head to foot, to realise there is not an inch of this man that isn’t armoured to the goddamn breathing slits, save for his face. Lotor has no choice but to go for the face.

Or to do something very, very weird.

Lotor jumps to his feet and shouts “Wait!” in his prince-voice.  
The one that would rouse his generals from various shenaniganizing and spur them onto their battle-stations, or spook an obstructive guard from his way if he needed to get to Zarkon.

Gods be thanked it works on Kolivan as well. Kolivan stops just short of bowling him over.

“It stops when one of us draws blood, yes?” Lotor strips off a glove and slashes his sword across his own palm and raises the dripping wound to the pale sun “There you go. I’ve drawn blood. No need to keep fighting.”

By way of reply, Kolivan glowers and kicks him flat on his back. Lotor has just enough times to throw up his arms and protect his face.

“I didn’t mean it like that, you strange thing.” 

 

In the end, nobody argues with Lance. Not even the people staffing the shields. As soon as Lance is patched through and explains what they are going to have to do, there is some kind of release of tension. It seems everyone on both ends of the connection can breathe much more easily, now that the acknowledgement of the impending doom has come. The soldiers have been given permission to make the heroic self-sacrifices they all aspire to- second to survival, of course. But an unspoken fear of dying in a common way runs among the soldiers; dying of the poison of an infected wound, being picked off by a faceless sniper, falling off something tall or being inadvertently crushed in the heat of a battle by Voltron. So far Voltron has not stepped on anybody it did not mean to step on, but each soldier of the Coalition is secretly convinced they will be the first, each time Voltron requires ground support.

But if death must come today, then at least it comes in a way that the grandkids can brag about. 

So what began as a stop-gap defensive measure to cover some refugees’ butts while they were evacuated becomes a suicide mission. Gravely, silently, the shield ships arrange themselves into a double-stacked wall. The first three ships will bear the brunt of the firing at the citadel. When they are shot to pieces, the other three will finish the task as the refugees are taken to safety. Voltron will focus the entirety of its attention and power on protecting the refugees’ transports, providing them cover along with a handful of infantry drones up to the edge of the atmosphere, where a waiting medical ship will take over.  
The staff of the shields have permission to use the teleports as they see fit. Still, it is understood that at least one person will have to be in the bridge up until the last second of the ship’s usefulness. At least six people are going to die today, as ordered by Lance. Maybe the worst part of all of this mess is neither Allura or Shiro raise a single word of protest as Lance explains what needs to happen. 

Independently, both of them are trying to find their voices. Shiro feels his tongue grow heavy and useless inside his head. He wants to weigh in- he really does- but at the same time, he is relieved to have the burden of leadership taken from him for the moment. At least this terrible choice won’t come back to him as one of his own. This can be something he allowed to happen. Not something he caused.   
Meanwhile, Allura does not trust herself to open her mouth without screaming. How would that strike the soldiers? The princess- the commander whose cause they are willing to die for, losing her mind minutes before at least six of them are dispatched to the afterlife. So she keeps her mouth shut, resolving to never do this to Lance again, if she can help it. 

When the empire’s force realise that Voltron is turning its attention towards the citadel, the ferocity of the attack trebles. The thickness of the laser fire reminds Hunk of visiting a great aunt’s house in the South, of watching a dense fog rise off of the swamps in the winter mornings. Of course there is no way that the shields can deflect that much fire-power, concentrated for that long. These ships were built with the idea of defending a base from a couple of stray but powerful blasts from long-rage weapons, not a head-on assault from what looks like an entire fucking armada of ships. 

Within two minutes, shield 4 begins to lose altitude. Whoever is in the cockpit realises the ship is a lost cause and decides they might as well take out as many of the empire’s ships as they can. Shield 4 veers out of formation and into the thick firing. It is engulfed quickly and the only indication that the ship was ever there at all comes in the form of an oily explosion somewhere behind the Galra lines.  
Out at the edge of orbit, a teleporter flares and disgorges three Coalition soldiers into the main hall, which has been made into a make-shift hospital of sorts. Coran darts out of the murmuring crowd in time to catch one of the soldiers before she falls flat. 

“Can I get a medic out here, please?” 

The woman’s eyes are open, but she isn’t looking at anything. Shock.

“What’s going on down there?” he looks to the two others “Oh. By Willow. Nyma, I had no idea you were on that ship.”

Nyma doesn’t seem to register that it is Coran she is speaking to, because she answers as if he is a stranger “There’s more ships down there than I thought one horizon could ever hold.”

 

Kolivan lunges, presumably for his throat. Lotor parts his arms to grin at him.

“I knew that.”

He stretches out his bloody palm and lets Kolivan smack face first into it, then smears his face with blood. For once, Lotor is pleased to have his corpse-colouring and the unmistakable scent of death in his blood, because it has the exact effect on Kolivan that he hoped. Absolute horror. A dark suspicion of Kolivan’s being confirmed- this person is not alive. And Kolivan reacts like any rational, thinking person who has just gotten a lot of corpse blood smeared in his eyes.   
He doubles up and dry-heaves and starts to pray aloud.

Lotor stands back, interested to see how much blood his lazy veins are willing to give up. It is hard to coax dead tissue to produce more blood. Most often, to counteract this, his body will just sort of ignore the fact that it has been cut open and quit bleeding before enough to form a clot has been collected and congealed upon the wound. Once it happened with a gouge that actually took one of his organs out. After he reclaimed the organ in question and popped it back in, the flow of blood came to a sullen stop. He was treated to the remarkable sight of his own body stitching itself back together, unbidden, into the clean and horrible whole Lotor has had to make his peace with.

Assuming Kolivan manages to remain conscious (and he probably will, because nobody with five daughters can be incapacitated by squeamishness) then Lotor will be happy to show him as his hand knits itself back together. Just like the needle, except this process is fuelled by something natural to Lotor that will not allow him the release of death. Or whatever equivalent he can hope for with his body being the way it is. 

“You said until one of us drew blood. I drew blood. If you actually wanted to fight me to get an idea of what I’m like in battle, you should have specified.”

Wisely, Kolivan covers his mouth and spares himself the extra horror of tasting dead blood. Once, by accident, Acxa bit him during a training session. She spent the rest of the evening throwing up and wouldn’t look him in the eye for two weeks after that. 

A snarl creases Kolivan’s face. It’s so fierce Lotor momentarily forgets his victory and takes a step back “What manner of abomination are you?”

Lotor shrugs “If that’s a fancy way of asking me who the hell made me, you can take it up with the bastard that invented the healing pods. This is what happens when you stick a half-dead kid in a leaky pod for a couple thousand deca-phoebs.”

“Good gods,” Kolivan takes a water flask from the bottomless utility belt and drains it onto his face, letting the putrid blood wash from his skin in threads “You’re dead. You can’t be alive. There’s no way something like you can move, and breathe, and speak.”

“I don’t need to breathe, really. I only do it when there’s someone else around. It puts people at ease.” Lotor yawns “This, though? The yawning? A habit I never could kick. Yawns are so damned infectious even us dead people can’t help them.”

“Is this why the empire cast you out?”

“What? Me being dead-ish? By Willow, no. Haggar and Zarkon just got sick of looking at my face.”

Kolivan glowers at him “A question for another day, then. When you’re more willing to cooperate.”

A roar startles them both. Forgetting the fight, both men dash to the edge of the roof. The edge of the particle barrier bristles with the hideous shapes of a handful of Flargars- the advance troops Kolivan mentioned earlier. Sighing, Kolivan turns around and heads back inside.

“We need to deal with that.”

Lotor jogs after him “Of course.”

Perhaps it is his imagination, some wishful thinking, but Lotor thinks he sees a slight, grudging respect in Kolivan’s eyes. Beneath the repulsion at having been unexpectedly splashed with dead blood, that is. 

 

The transports huddle behind Voltron as best they can. She ferries five of them to the edge of the atmosphere with each trip. Thanks to Taujeer’s relatively tiny size, the trips are short, lasting no more than three minutes with Voltron travelling at a pace that will not outstrip the transports. Then, when they are safely on their way to the medical ship, Voltron free-falls back down to the surface of the planet in a dozen seconds.  
Each moment is one the shields can ill afford. With the loss of 4, another comes up from the back to fill the gap and is destroyed almost as quickly. This one has no opportunity to kamikaze; it has barely cleared the other shields when it explodes. 

By the time they have finished the second trip, it is obvious to all of the Paladins that not every transport is going to make it away. With twelve more waiting for their chance to go and only four shields still operational, Allura makes a tough call.

“All transports launch, now. We haven’t got the time for another trip. If anyone else is going to make it out today, this is how it happens.” then, to the shields “Anyone still capable of flight is to rise with us.”

Only one ship follows them up. Two more manage to replicate 4’s epic departure, causing the heavy fire to stall, giving the transports a head-start as they leap into the dusty sky as one. Voltron puts up an admirable effort. Drones, cut in half left and right and gunners in dozens as Voltron dual-wields her cannon and sword. But there are simply too many of them. 

Of the twelve transports that leave Taujeer, only seven manage to dock at the medical ship. Inside the ship, the soldiers from the shields wait about the transport. Two more have come through after Nyma’s group.   
Survivors come in pairs or alone, and when Rolo stumbles out in a cloud of smoke that was carried through with him, they all understand he will be the last.

Nyma catches his arm, pulling him to his feet.

“How many of us-” he breaks off into a coughing fit.

“Nine.”

He buries his face in her shoulder. 

On the bridge of the medical ship, Matt has just managed to get patched through to Voltron “Is that everyone?”

“Everyone that made it.” says Shiro.

“Fuck. Did we lose every single fucking shield?”

“Yeah,” Pidge lets out a shuddering sigh “If you get a second- I mean, you probably won’t, but if you do can you check if Nyma and Rolo got out alive? Because I need to know if I have to give Beezor some bad news.”

“I’ll get on it as soon as I can. First I gotta get this thing hooked up to the castle’s teludav so we can get out of here. You did a good job, guys.” Matt is silent for a moment, and seems to be pushing back tears “I know it doesn’t seem that way now, but honestly? That was one of the most successful we’ve ever pulled off.”

One of them starts to cry. Matt doesn’t have the heart to ask which one it is.  
Hours later Lance has retreated to his room and is laying on his bed, shed of his armour and most of his clothes. The armour seemed to tighten around him as soon as he got back to the castle. To squeeze him, as if wanted to crush him to powder, to be rid of him in any way possible. Lance left Allura and Shiro to deal with the fallout of the decision- the one he made for all of them, which for some reason they all let him make. He left the bridge at a run and didn’t look back, though both Hunk and Coran called after him. There is every chance one of them is going to show up at the door tonight. In which case, Lance will pretend he is asleep.

The room is dark and quiet. It is as if the castle knows he needs a moment and has taken the trouble to silence itself for his sake. Indulgent as the thought is, it makes Lance smile and feel just a little bit loved.

Lance has already taken his usual post-battle shower, but it hasn’t done anything to make him feel less contaminated. There is something like sand or needles on his skin. Every time he moves, it prickles and itches and makes him want to scratch at himself until his skin is coming off under his nails. Guilt, maybe. Or maybe he’s spontaneously become allergic to the armour under-suit. The way life is going right now it really wouldn’t surprise him. 

Out of nowhere, something speaks in Lance’s mind. Like a voice calling through a window two stories up, or he’s being spoken to through a long piece of piping.  
“Tengo confianza en su capacidad. En sus elecciones. Más y más cada dia.” 

“Edgy?” Lance sits up, wiping a knuckle across his eyes. 

“Claro.”

“ñooooo…no puede creerlo! Pensé que no me soportabas. ¿Porque no me hablaste? Soló diez o doce palabras hasta que nos convertimos compañeros.” 

Edgy searches for the right words “Porque…estaba muy confundido. Sobre la situación, y sobre Keith. Lo extrañe mucho.” 

“You can switch to English if you want to. I know I think in Spanish, but you don’t have to speak it if you don’t want to.”

Edgy sounds a little disappointed in himself “Was my Spanish really that bad?”

“Nah, it was fine! You just seem like you would be more comfortable in this one.”

“You’re not wrong.”

Lance is sure Edgy would rather be speaking in Korean or Japanese, or whatever language it is that Keith uses most frequently in his mind. Thank god they have a language in common.

“So…what made you want to drop in today?” Lance lays back on the bed and stares at the low ceiling. He aches all over “You’re not talkative. Actually, you might be talkative. I don’t know because we don’t do much talking.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Why are you sorry?” Lance feels a bit ridiculous asking this of a small lump in the alien plaster.

“I haven’t been doing my best to make you feel welcome,” a strange noise punctuates this; a cat huffing “But you never had a verbal exchange with Guapa?”

Lance winces “No. We managed to communicate just fine anyway.”

“Cool. I think I’d prefer to talk to you, just the same.”

“Wow. Extra-terrestrial lion gods say ‘cool’, huh?”

“I’m also trans-dimensional.” 

For the first time since Keith left the castle, Lance laughs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spanish translations  
> Edgy: I have confidence in you. In your choices. More and more every day.   
> Edgy: Clearly (read as 'duh')  
> Lance: *Cuban exclamation of surprise and joy* I can't believe it! I thought you couldn't stand me. How come you didn't talk to me? Only ten or twelve words since we became partners  
> Edgy: Because...I was very confused. About the situation, and about Keith. I missed him a lot


	11. Pillow talk, but not the sexy kind

Hunk wakes and sits bolt upright, briefly convinced that his room is full of green light and creatures picked out of the darkness between these beams. He blinks a couple of times and shakes his head before he can sort between his surroundings from the vivid dream Kitty seems to be in the middle of. At first it came as a surprise to him when he figured out his lion could dream. Those impossibly bright, impossibly vivid images in his head that frightened him into believing he had lost his mind for a good two weeks were actually just the dreams of an ancient being crowding in on his own, human dreams. Only about half of what Hunk sees from Kitty gets processed into something he can grasp. The rest become so much static and white noise in his head, too complex to be fathomed by a mammal using such a meagre percentage of its little ape brain.   
Now, the idea that he could have come up with any of Kitty’s outlandish alien thoughts with his own mind makes him laugh. Compared to Kitty’s brain, Hunk’s is like a bulldozer to a paintbrush. The two do not even belong in the same studio.

Hunk reclines back on his pillows. With the same sort of gesture he might use to scratch his back, Hunk reaches into the latter parts of his mind and does the mental equivalent of poking Kitty. Her thoughts shudder and brighten in response. He has woken her up now, but she is pleased to hear from him. As usual, Kitty eschews words in favour of waves of emotion. It passes into him and manifests as a warm, buoyant sensation in his chest: her way of saying hello. Her way of interacting is a weird combination of visual cues he only half understands and colours that are at the same time emotions. It’s like watching someone communicate using semaphore flags and bee dancing, but it works, somehow.   
Rarely does she use words. Even then, it’s usually because she has picked out an interesting word in his very verbal stream of thought. 

Right away, Kitty becomes vocal. She wants to know about the dream Hunk was having just before her own budged in on his consciousness. It was a dream of Samoa and Kitty wants to know the meaning of what he was saying to his mothers and siblings. She wants words for the things she saw, too, and all of them now, preferably.   
In his dream Hunk was at his maternal grandfather’s place on Manono watching his sister get some work done on her tautau. More like a memory - Hunk can pretty clearly remember there was a day in his boyhood when his grandfather took advantage of the amount of skin his swimwear showed off to walk Hunk through the details of his pe’a, just before they went to watch his sister’s session. He pointed out the fale that would appear in Hunk’s own. 

For a long time, he explains to Kitty, he nursed a kind of aversion to the thought of getting his pe’a. His grandfather made it clear he would be expected to have the process done using the traditional tortoiseshell needle, which made Hunk sick to his stomach to think about. Considering he was an eight-year-old with an intense phobia of blood the day he saw his much older sister getting the work done on her, it’s no surprise the fear attached itself to the notion of a pe’a.   
Not anymore. Hunk has long since recovered from his squeamishness. War has stripped him of that luxury. The day Hunk gets his pe’a isn’t too far into the future now that he thinks about it. At this moment, if somebody broke down his door and told Hunk he could be under that needle in Manono in ten minutes if he just followed them, Hunk would have a tough time not getting out of bed. 

Kitty speaks clearly, surprising him “I miss them too.”

“Miss who?” he says aloud.

“Your family.”

“Oh yeah? Walk me through that.” 

Kitty does her version of a smile. It is like opening a door onto a warm summer’s day, or stepping into deep, soft grass.  
“I know them through you. And when you think about them, you think about how you miss them. So I miss them too.”

For all of the divinity of her dreams, Kitty subscribes to a kind of wonderfully simple wisdom that Hunk just loves. He can follow her logic as clear as train-tracks.

“That’s sweet of you, Kitty.”

“Thank you. You are also sweet.”

“You can go back to sleep now,” Hunk sighs “You had a hard day.”

“We.” she says, firm and gentle “What will you do?”

“I’ve been thinking about the conversation I had with those scientists. About the heximite and stuff. I think I’m gonna call Keith about it. See if he can do some scouting for me, since he’s probably awake right now, and not, like, fresh from a hell battle like Rolo and Nyma, otherwise I’d be asking them. Or Shay, but she just got out of that skirmish in Va’Kar and Beezor is working on that hostage thingie with the royal family of Tolos… shit, Kitty, everybody I know in space is up to their neck in it.”

“War.” says Kitty.

“You got that right. Have some good dreams, ok? I’m sorry I woke you up.”

“I’m not.” and then she is asleep again. The lions seem to be able to tune out of reality at will the way they do when they want to sleep. Then again, they are trans-dimensional demigods, so it would be more surprising if they couldn’t. 

Calculating that it will be about six in the evening in Chornea’s time, Hunk gropes for his laptop and brings up the communication channels. Hopefully Keith hasn’t busted his communicator in battle. Or turned it off with his butt again. 

 

The past couple of days have been utterly weird. A part of Keith is grateful that he spent most of them in a delirious haze of pain waiting for his body to finish healing, because it gave him an excuse to miss what must have been the weirdest of exchanges. At some point while he was conked out in his bunk, Kolivan and Lotor seem to have built up some trust. The tiniest, most fragile bit of trust in the universe- it can only be considered trust in the way that a tricycle is considered a vehicle because it serves the barest minimum of function, but trust all the same.  
Keith doesn’t think he would have been able to stomach watching that happen. It would be like watching a human body get inverted. He just knows he’s looking at something weird and strange and probably in direct conflict with several natural laws. 

But since he didn’t have to see it happen, he can kind of tolerate it. This afternoon when Kolivan said he had found a ship that was still perfectly serviceable in the basement levels and was going out for a quick check-in with a Blade base, leaving Keith and Lotor to their own devices for a few days, Keith nodded silently as if this was a normal thing to hear and expect. 

Keith is also not sure if he should feel bad that he was reassured when Kolivan pulled him aside after telling the two of them they were going to be alone for a while.  
“If he does anything- and I mean anything at all that can be interpreted as a serious threat to your safety, or to his confinement here, stab him. Stab him wherever you want. He will be fine.”

“Kolivan, you’re freaking me out.”

Kolivan had taken him by the shoulders and looked him in the eye with a crazed sort of urgency “I mean it. You may stab him in the lungs, chest, the heart, the other heart, the third heart. Wherever you want to. What is a fatal injury to us is…a mild inconvenience to him. The child is flatulence in the face of the natural laws of the world. Fart back if you must.”

Then to top it all off Kolivan unexpectedly gave him a hug. Of course Keith froze up and didn’t reciprocate, but Kolivan seemed fine with that. He understands Keith has a tenuous relationship with open displays of affection. So does Kolivan. Apparently it is such a big deal in his family, his daughter Porrxis made a booklet of ‘hug coupons’ which she and her siblings cash in when they feel Kolivan has gone a bit too long between displays of paternal affection.   
Last time Porrxis saw Keith, she slipped him one of the coupons (hand-written on paper crystal, with a lot of fanged smiley faces in the margins) and winked at him. It might have been a wink. She wears an eyepatch so it’s difficult to tell between the winks and the blinks.

By the time Hunk calls in, Keith has been alone with Lotor for a handful of hours and has yet to actually speak to the prince. They are lodging next-door to each other. Occasionally, Keith gets up and pokes his head into Lotor’s room, fixing him with a filthy stare. Each time Lotor has stared back at him from his bunk, over the top of a space-kindle. Keith retreats in silence without breaking his stare, Lotor goes back to his reading and maybe fifteen minutes later they do it all again.

So when Hunk calls Keith it is like getting called back to reality. Yanked back by the seat of his pants.

Keith does not even realise that he has been glowering at his prisoner in his sports bra and a pair of ugly yoga pants until he looks down at himself to check if he’s appropriately dressed to greet a friend. 

“Hey.” Keith grabs his communicator and swallows a scream. 

“Wow. You look like absolute hell.”

“Thanks Hunk.”

Not that Hunk looks much better. He appears to be calling Keith from his bed. The light issuing from the screen of his communicator is unflattering and makes it all the more obvious just how hard the lack of good quality sleep is affecting him. Keith has a vague idea of what went on the other day at Taujeer from the radio chatter- heavy losses, including half of the shield ships the Coalition had at their disposal. 

He wants to talk to know what Lance thinks about that. Is it a power move, to show that the empire is still going strong in spite of everything Voltron has done against it, or are they desperate, and putting on a show of force to distract from a crumbling government? Since Zarkon has recovered from whatever mysterious ailment had him presumably bedridden, he might be trying to prove himself an effective leader after the gentle fiasco Lotor left behind him. But when Keith tries to commit any serious thought to the machinations of the Galra empire, his head starts to spin and he finds himself going in pointless circles. 

“Where did that bruise come from?” asks Hunk, gesturing to the deep purple mark beside Keith’s left eye.

He scratches absently at it, marvelling that the bruise does not hurt “I don’t know. Woke up with it. I think I must have punched myself in my sleep.”

Hunk laughs “Is that something both you Broganes do? God, you should have seen Shiro yesterday. He was taking a nap on my workbench- you know how he just kind of lets sleep take him wherever it finds him? So I put a blanket over him, and ten minutes later he sits up and looks me dead in the eye and says ‘I’m gonna kill you all if you don’t watch out’, so I go ‘How are you gonna do that’ and he thinks really hard for a second, then says ‘with Pogs’ and lays the fuck back down. Your brother is weird. I hope I’m not laughing at his PTSD-”

Keith shakes his head “He was like that before he was traumatised. What’s a Brogane?”

“You two. You’re a Kogane, he’s a Shirogane. You guys are brothers. Together you make the Broganes.”

“Did Lance come up with that?”

“No, it was Matt.”

Keith grins “How are you enjoying being stuck in the castle with Matt? Sick of his wily charms yet?”

Hunk groans “I always thought Lance was gonna be the ultimate memelord of the castle, but he’s proving me wrong.”

“Did you know his name is actually short for Mathematics?”

Letting out a whoop of laughter, Hunk throws his head back “You’re shitting me!”

“I’m not! Like, four months into the Kerberos mission, Shiro used a billion dollar satellite to call me at stupid o’clock Chicago time to show me this personnel document that had Matt’s full name on it. Mathematics Johnathan Holt. And I know for a goddamn fact that Pidge’s middle name is Copernicus. Katherine Copernicus Holt and Mathematics Johnathan Holt. I mean, I know my name is Keith, and I’m talking to a Henry, but who the fuck does that to their children?”

“The Holts are dangerous.”

“And you haven’t even met their mom yet.”

Hunk wipes a tear from the corner of his eye “Man, I miss you.”

Keith can almost hear the gears grinding to a halt in his brain. Oh God. Oh God. Affection. Unsolicited and genuine. Why is there no handbook of appropriate and expected responses for human interactions? Why can’t Keith just crack open a copy of his ‘How To Emote’ handbook and trawl through the index until he finds a page that will tell him how to respond to Hunk, how to say, yes, I miss you too, and it means so much to me that my presence in your life is important enough that you notice when I’m absent.

Keith blurts out the first thing that sounds reasonable in his head “And I miss not having to worry about getting stabbed in my sleep.”

“Prince Hairtor giving you trouble?”

“No. Not yet. I don’t know. It’s almost worse that he isn’t attacking me. I mean, I’m just sitting here in my fucking underwear waiting to be attacked, basically.”

Hunk squares his jaw “Well, I have something that might help. I’ve got an errand for you and Lootoot. If he has to worry about not getting killed, then he can’t really worry about killing you.”

Keith straightens up a little bit, scratching at the red marks the elastic of his bra has left on his shoulders “Sure. Shoot.”

“After we finished the evac, the scientific greats of the Taujeer tracked me down to talk to me. Apparently I’m the Paladin to go to if you need some good chemical science done. Anyway, one of the main reasons their society finally decided to up and join the Coalition was because the Galra outpost was doing some weird shit to the soil. They complained about these explosions all night and day long. It was confusing to them, because there was really nothing to blow up over there except for- I can’t say the word. It was their native word for those creepy sand-worm things. It was like a…” here, Hunk makes a gargling noise that trails up into a shrill whine.

A fist crashes on the wall that Hunk shares with Pidge. Muffled and indignant, Pidge cries “It’s four in the fucking morning!”

“This is for science, Pidge! Go to sleep! Your tiny body needs it!”

“Sleep is for allosexuals!” she shouts back.

Lotor’s voice pipes up from the next room “What’s an allosexual?”

“Hold on a second.” Keith says to Hunk. He gets up, slams the door with as much force as he can muster, then returns to the bunk.   
He pushes the communicator onto his pillow and lays flat on his stomach like a lizard sunning itself. There’s a painful cramp in his lower-back that might be a warning sign of his period (which has started again, because the T-coil implanted in his arm hit its four-year expiration date last month), or some injury he picked up during the battle with the Flargars. Whatever it is, it makes a real task of getting comfortable.

“You good?”

“Got a cramp near my ass.”

Hunk cocks an eyebrow “Dude, you’re growing a tail!”

“I’m hanging up.”

Hunk throws his hands in the air “Ok! Ok! No more Galra jokes. I’m sorry. Anyway, it turned out the empire were testing a way to add a huge amount of heximite to the natural soil and bedrock of a planet. A continent. Any landmass of any significant size. You get where I’m going with this?”

Yawning behind his hand, Keith nods “You’re thinking they were testing the process on Taujeer that allowed them to make that planet from the other day into a bomb?”

“Not just testing. They did it. It worked, they had their heximite transmutation process down pat. What they were doing was using Taujeer the way the American military used the Bikini Atoll. Just to a less devastating effect. They were using it to figure out how each transmutation process should work, like, the ingredients they needed, the kind of magical ritual that needed to accompany it, but which was also gonna have to mesh with the final, long distance ritual that set the would be supposed to set off the planet. So samples of all sorts of different planets’ soils and bedrocks would be brought over. I’m not quite sure how the empire’s scientists made it so, like, the transmutation process of one certain kind of soil from a planet would work for every kind of soil that same planet had on it. That makes no sense to me. Like, imagine the transmutation process to make sand a huge-ass bomb being the same to make fertile volcanic soil a bomb too was the same? That makes no sense because you’re not even working with a lot of the same basic chemical components- whup, there’s a glaze on your eyes. Have I lost you?”

Keith gives his head a shake “No! No, I’m following you.”

“Ok, I’ll cut to the chase. Basically at the moment I have a huge job ahead of me, finding all these planets that have been turned into heximite payloads by the empire. And it only works for payloads where more than 50% of the planet has had its topsoil affected in some way by the terraforming. The one that nearly killed us? That was an unusually huge payload, like, built to take out an entire solar system. A hostage-taking kind of payload. A bargaining chip kind of payload. What I’m worried about are the payloads built to cripple dissenting planetoids. I think we’re discovering a kind of…of insurance system. A fail-safe to ensure compliance. And now that that’s really getting away from Zarkon and Haggar I’m worried they might start setting them off. In fact, more than worried, I’m sure they will. I’m just surprised they haven’t already started detonating the smaller payloads.”

“What do you want me to do about it?”

“Are you able to leave the planet at all?”

Keith sucks a breath in past his teeth “Jesus. I don’t know. Kolivan just left.”

“Where to?”

“He didn’t say. I think he was worried Lotor might find out.”

“I’ve no idea, just so you know.” says Lotor right outside the door. 

Keith nearly jumps out of his skin. He hops up and rips the door open, coming face to face with Lotor’s clavicle.  
“Why are you just- what the fuck?”

“May I come in?”

“Sure! But understand Keith will stab you if you do anything weird!” calls Hunk tinnily from the communicator.

Lotor steps around Keith and puts his back to the wall opposite of the bunk. Keith doesn’t feel secure enough to stretch himself out again, but he hunches up and leans over the pillow, resolving that he will ignore Lotor as best he can.  
“What do you want me to do?” 

“Us.” suggests Lotor.

“I wouldn’t ask this except there’s a transport going by Chornea pretty soon. The Taujeer told me the empire loaded their experiments up onto this thing,” an image of a sleek-looking ship with a huge solar sail pops up in the chat window “Just before the empire started to attack. I’ve had all of our agents and commanders and whatnot on the look out for this ship. Well, boys, God must really love us right now, because would you believe we have an actual agent on that ship? A fucking deep-cover plant? Here’s her photo.”

“Oh!” Keith leans forwards “That’s Lallia! One of Kolivan’s daughters.”

Hunk raises his hands as if in hallelujah “It’s meant to be. There it is. I believe in God again. Listen, the ship is passing over Chornea at, um,” he pauses to do the math in his head “About thirteen in the morning in your time. Do you think you could get up there and maybe just…latch on? There should be a manifest of the names of the planets they’ve transmuted. Our agent, Lamia-”

“Lallia.”

“That’s what I said. Anyway, she’s only a hired gun for the protection of the ship. I’d have asked her to sneak in and copy the manifest for me, but her cover position is super delicate when she’s not being outsourced to other organisations. Would you believe she-”

“Is the personal bodyguard of one of Haggar’s head Druids,” finishes Keith “I know, Hunk. This woman has braided my hair.”

“Cool, cool. Ok. I’m gonna put you in contact with her in a minute. She’ll help you figure out a plan for docking with the ship when it passes overhead.”

“Sounds like a difficult job.”

Keith jumps; he had forgotten Lotor was in here.

“You want us to dock with a ship that presumably won’t be slowing down when it passes over us. And you want us to steal a manifest of highly sensitive information without being detected, or putting any suspicion upon a colluding agent working on that ship. All of that will happen in a very limited amount of time this ship will spend passing over Chornea. Am I correct?”

“Hey, if you wanna hang back and let Keith do all the grunt work, I’m sure Keith will be happy to tie you to a radiator or something.”

Lotor is suddenly at Keith’s shoulder, leaning down to smirk at Hunk “On the contrary. I’m positively gasping for a challenge.”

Keith puts a hand in Lotor’s face and pushes him away “Send away, Hunk. We’ll do it.”

 

(A couple parsecs away)

“There you are! I was beginning to think your communicator was broken.” Acxa throws her hands up in relief “Are you alright? You look a little pale, honey.”

Acxa is stretched out on her belly on the top bunk of the room. As much as Sendak helped, there was only so much he could do about the sort of ship that was assigned to them for the mission. Thanks to the minimal amount of space onboard Acxa has been forced to share a room with Ezor, who is taking her all-important pre-mission nap.  
Not that the coming mission should be any sort of stressful one. Really, it is more of an errand for Haggar. Thanks to the relative collapse of the situation in Taujeer, one of Haggar’s vague and menacing experiments was put into jeopardy and all of the important relating to it had to be evacuated from the planet. Before Acxa and her sister generals can even think about beginning to track down Lotor they have to secure those delicate materials for Haggar and transport them to her. Why Haggar can’t just get her druids to do it, Acxa doesn’t know.

“Pale?” repeats her daughter “Me? No way, no how. I feel fantastic. Why would you even suggest I look anything less than a million percent? You know how fragile my self-esteem is.”

Acxa rolls her eyes “Alright, you look perfect. But stressed out. Perfect but stressed. Is that acceptable?”

She nods “I’m fine, really. How far out are you, by the way? Because I mean there’s, like, no need to hurry at all. In fact you could catch up tomorrow and I’m sure it wouldn’t be a problem.”

There is something a little off in her daughter’s tone, but Acxa doesn’t have the energy to suss out what. That and Ezor’s enthused snoring on the lower bunk makes it a little hard to concentrate “It’s sweet of you to worry. Don’t, though. The sooner we get through with this the better, really. We should be caught up to you a matter of hours. It will have to be quick, though, I’m afraid we won’t have much time to catch up.”

“Well, so long as I get a hug!” says Lallia through a distinctly nervous smile “I’m sure we’ll get this business finished without a hitch.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Coming up, we meet one of Kolivan's daughters! Yay? And Keith and Lotor get to try some of that 'teamwork' they've been hearing about. 
> 
> Also, it seems like Kolivan might have omitted some important information about who, exactly, he had that tribe of warrior daughters with. Whoops?


	12. The council of sisters, and the weather in Chicago

There is, in times of high crisis for the Qarlyle family, a safety net which Keith thinks of as a ‘sister hotline’. Not too long after he left Voltron for the Blade his own number was added to this hotline so that he too is included whenever one of Kolivan’s numerous daughters wants input on a problem. More than once Keith has been awoken in the middle of the night by the council of sisters advising their unfortunate member on her latest deadline, under-staffed military unit or parenting issue. 

The drawback of being a part of the Qarlyle hotline is that at any moment Keith might be expected to push the pause button in a battle, squat somewhere with cover and advise Damxis on how she should wear her hair for an up-coming date. Kolivan understands. Most of the time he is happy to provide Keith with enough cover to do his duty to the council of sisters, so long as he can wrap up his own contribution in under four minutes.   
Keith is working his way up to accessing the council of sisters for some help. It’s never been easy for him to admit that he has difficulties making emotional connections to other people. The only person he never once suspected of wanting to abandon him or freeze him out of their life is Shiro. His brother. More than that; the only person who ever offered him love with the understanding that he could be forgiven for his mistakes. Estrangement, in their family, was a touchy subject, but Shiro had always made it clear that it would never happen between them even if Keith did something unforgivable. Whether Shiro meant murder or finishing off his left-overs without permission, he never made clear. Then again Keith has done both of those things many times since they joined Voltron and Shiro has yet to raise a significant protest. 

Some part of him- a large part of him, actually, is afraid that even admitting he has problems to the council of sisters, with opening up will be enough to drive away anybody that is attempting to form a connection with him. On earth people would speculate. What was wrong with Keith that socialisation was so hard for him? Then came assumptions based on his ethnicity (Korean and Japanese, he used to think, but apparently his Japanese heritage was just a convenient fib to cover up the furry, purple truth) or his gender identity (still a trans-dude, last time he checked) or that he might have some mental illness lurking underneath the already withdrawn surface (very possible, since every human he is related to has been on anti-depressants at one point), and the effort of all that speculation put people off of him. Keith was too ‘complicated’ to bother with.   
Even though the Qarlyles don’t have the human context from which to judge his identity, they might still find something irrevocably objectional about him if he isn’t careful. 

He has to be careful with what he says on the hotline. Though the council don’t spend their time passing unanimous judgements over a single member of their group, Keith is always afraid he might be the first case of an excommunication from the council of sisters. It would hurt, even though he is only an honorary brother. 

That’s why he gets a small thrill of terror each time his communicator goes off and shows all five of the thumbnails.   
Even today, it does not occur to him to link the sudden call with the mission he and Lotor are supposed to be leaving for within the hour.

Swallowing on a dry throat, Keith opens the call, audio-only so the women can’t see how nervous he is “Hello-”

They’re all talking at once. Keith’s natural tendency to assume the worst has happened at first translates this as abuse. They’re screaming abuse at him, about what a shitty apprentice he is because Kolivan is dead and it was his fault. Or Lotor has somehow managed to escape and cause untold damage to the Coalition in the ten minutes since Keith laid eyes on him.

 

“-dangerous! Call it off, call it off!” Porrxis is shouting.

“-risk him with Mom! She can’t keep turning a blind eye to Lallia’s quiznakery forever!” Callanora is shouting.

“-get away with everything up to this point and it’s Keith who might suffer the consequences! He’s just a kitten!” Kolxa is shouting.

“-knew she would be attached to the mission at all! I thought she’d already be looking for Lotor, but apparently Haggar’s making her play errand-queen!” Lallia is shouting.

“-quiznakkers! None of you are free of sin!” Damxis is shouting, then, much more calmly “Oh, Keith picked up. Hi Keith.”

At once the shouting smooths out into the pleased purr-like tones as they greet him over each other.

Keith’s heart slows- as does his second heart, the sensations of which, for a long time he mistook for a consistent and weirdly situated pocket of gas “What’s going on? Is something wrong with the mission?”

“Oh, kitten, the mission is doomed.” says Porrxis at the same time that Lallia says brightly “Not at all, kitten!”

“Lallia! Don’t sugar-coat it! The boy’s old enough to know when the quiznak hits the space-fan!” retorts Damxis. She sounds angry, but he can’t tell at what. Then again Damxis always sounds like she is about to pop a cap in someone’s ass.

“There’s something we need to tell you.” says Kolxa grimly.

Keith pops his head into the hall and closes the door as soon as he is sure Lotor won’t slink out of the shadows to eavesdrop “Is somebody sick? Pregnant?”

“Nobody’s pregnant!” exclaims Porrxis “I haven’t gotten laid in phoebs.”

“Porrxis!” cry the other four, scandalised.

“It’s about our mothers,” Lallia is talking fast now, presumably so none of her sisters have the chance to talk over her. She turns on her visual feed.   
As far as Keith can tell she is squatting somewhere dark. Possibly a storage closet, considering the shaft of a turbo-mop leaning on her shoulder and the bottles of cleaning fluid that glisten behind her. Keith is impressed. Though Lallia is the youngest and was technically considered a runt by Galra standards when she was born, she has grown into a young woman that could not be called small by any stretch of the imagination. There is about nine feet of her arranged into a column of muscle and sinew that makes her a good battering ram when you need to get through a crowd. In spite of her intimidating height and bulky size, she has a sweet face and a mouth that never stops smiling.

Now, as she tries to impart some dark family secret to Keith, she cannot shake the tiny smile in the corner of her mouth which she was born with “So you know how Porrxis and I have a different mom?”

Keith nods “A Galra woman.”  
The first three of Kolivan’s daughters were conceived and raised with a different woman, Altean by ethnicity. She left after Callanora was born and died shortly afterwards in a skirmish between Galra soldiers and resistance fighters. The woman belonged to neither faction; she was simply walking home from work one day and got torn to shreds in the crossfire. Kolivan raised his three girls alone for five years until he met another woman, this one Galra, who fell in love with him and his rambunctious trio. The fact that her step-daughters were half-Galra, half-Altean did not matter to her.

Until the opportunity for a promotion arose. Weird that a career soldier good enough to be recommended for a high-up position the way Porrxis and Lallia’s biological mother was should partner up with a career rebel. They have assured him it’s actually quite normal. Most people hate the government and their archaic rhetoric about special superiority. People who are quite normal and reasonable otherwise will charge into battle against an uprising, then go home where they quite possibly have children or partners who belong to the same people which they were dispatched to fight.  
It couldn’t be so for Kolivan’s second partner. To be eligible for the position she had to show she was willing to commit herself to the furthering of the Galra people. The Galra, specifically the fully-blooded Galra, and not the half-heritage girls she cherished as her own.

So she split up from Kolivan, cut off contact from the half and fully Galra daughters alike, and devoted herself entirely to her career. For a couple of years. Later on she came back to the family. Personally, having experienced the pain of parental abandonment and what it does to the care-giver who remains behind, Keith would never have accepted her back into the fold of family life. But they did. The Qarlyles consider her one of them and have done for the last sixteen or so years, and their mother no longer seems to care about the pall a mixed-heritage family casts on anymore career advancements.

Keith puts the pieces together about half a second before Lallia can deliver the bad news.

“Oh fuck, do I have to fight her?”

“Mom’s a general-” Lallia stumbles over her words “I hope not! No, no, you shouldn’t have to!”

The dread has dawned fully now. Keith understands exactly what she is trying to tell him and it makes him crack his head against the wall “Fuck. Fuck! Which one of Lotor’s generals is she? Is she Zethrid? Because I cannot fight Zethrid and win- she’ll snap me in half like the twink I am- twig! I meant twig!”

“No! Her name is Acxa.” now Kolxa switches to her visual feed so Keith can see her pale, nervous, wringing her tail in her hands “She’s the shorter one. The one with the hair.”

“Lotor!” he bellows.

“What?” the reply is strangely muffled as if Lotor is calling back from underneath a lot of blankets.

“Where are you? Bring your ass in here! We have a problem!”

“What sort of problem?” 

“Acxa!”

Suddenly a panel swings loose from the ceiling and Lotor slithers free. His face is ashen.  
“What about Acxa?”

“Why were you in the vents?”

“I was exploring the secret passage- who are you talking to?”

Keith flips his communicator around to face Lotor and give the council of sisters a good look at him “These are Kolivan’s daughters. I told you one of them would be meeting us for the, uh…”

“Heist!” suggests Damxis.

Lotor did not expect to be put on the spot in this way, with five strange women staring and judging him. The two whose faces he can see must be a bit scary to the uninitiated- if Keith didn’t know them to be a group of wonderful and loving sisters he might have mistaken them for a street gang.  
But then Lotor is used to hanging out with frightening women who appear to be a violent street gang at a distance, so he is able to recover quickly. 

“You’re Acxa’s daughters. Her five warrior women?”

“Mom talked about us at work?” Callanora scoffs “I thought she still had to pretend we don’t exist with you.”

Lotor glances at Keith before he catches himself- but he’s looking for just long enough that Keith can pick up a definite plea for help in his eyes. 

This time, Keith decides, he will throw him a bone. If only because he understands how intimidating it can be when all five of the Qarlyles converge on you “Do you want us to call it off? I’d be fine with that. I don’t want to fight your mother.”

“Kitten, I don’t want you to fight our mother. Where do you think we got all of this from?” Kolxa flexes a bicep thicker than Keith’s waist.

“That’s not all. All of the generals are coming. All three of them are gonna be on the ship in less than an hour.” mutters Lallia “What do you want to do?”

Keith wants to faint, mostly. He wants his eyes to roll back in his head and his muscles to go slack, useless and deposit him on the floor. He wants most of his body weight to land on his head so he has a concussion and therefore an excuse to crawl back into bed and cry into his pillow.

He takes a deep breath “We’re still coming. If something goes wrong? We’ll figure it out.”

 

(Chicago. Takashi Shirogane’s bedroom, a couple of weeks earlier)

Shiro has gotten out of bed, put on his favourite and by far ugliest sweater and coaxing the ancient coffee machine to life when it comes to him that he definitely should not be here. Why this thought has launched itself out of his soupy brain and latched to the little part of him that is thinking at this hour of the morning, he has no idea. It is such a dizzying prospect that Shiro has to abandon his efforts with the coffee machine and sit down at the kitchen table with a swimming head. 

Why is this not where he should be?

The view out of the kitchen window is the one he expects. A liberal dusting of snow and children on the playground. His potted plant Herbert-san flourishes on the window sill, bigger since the last time Shiro saw him. But that makes sense. Plants grow. Herbert-san did plenty of growing while he and Keith were away for the term at the Garrison, with cousin Shika’s loving attention. The mess of magnets on front of the fridge belongs to him, as does the toaster with the dent that makes it look like a frowning face, the ceiling with the inexpert plaster patch-job in the far right corner and the incongruous marble countertop which is still chipped from the time Keith got it in his head to strike a golf club against it. 

Shiro then thinks to look down at himself. Ugly sweater, uglier yoga pants, bed-socks that are so ugly he feels like he has a responsibility to humanity to burn them. Then he notices something odd about his hand. It’s grey and doesn’t quite feel right. Like he has soaked it in cold water for a couple of minutes, and when he squeezes his fingers to a fist, the flesh does not yield the way it should. 

Rolling up his sleeve, Shiro is briefly and blissfully confused by what he sees. A robot arm? More sophisticated and detailed than anything medical technology on earth can produce, producing a faint purple light that does not look entirely of this earth. For a moment Shiro is just a normal guy who cannot explain how in the hell a robot arm got onto his body.

This makes it all the more devastating when the truth rushes back to him and knocks him out of his chair, breathless, to the floor. His eyes grow wet. His head pounds. The onslaught of stress does a number on the paper-thin blood vessels in his nose and soon enough he’s got blood pooling around him, just to make it that much more fun.   
Shiro manages to push himself up on an elbow. He has a vague idea that he should get up and call someone- anyone, Shika or the Garrison or Coleen Holt or maybe even the phone number their father scratched into a postcard from Turkey that Shiro pushed into the back of his desk so Keith wouldn’t have to look at it. 

Then “Who the fuck are you?”

Paladin of Voltron, thinks Shiro, and very fucking far from where I’m supposed to be. It takes a monumental effort to look over his shoulder and identify the source of the disturbance as a youngish girl who, for a horrifying moment, Shiro is convinced is actually Lance.

The girl reaches up into her leaf-printed hijab and seizes a pin from it, putting it in between her knuckles “I said, who the fuck are you?”

“Lance?”

The girl nearly falls on her ass “Who- what? What the fuck?”

She’s got an accent. So does Lance, when he isn’t consciously repressing it.

Shiro gets onto his kneels. He feels ridiculously formal for a moment- as if he’s just sat down to a dinner at his grandparents’ traditional Japanese dining table “My name is Takashi-”

“Shirogane!” she points at him, her face growing ashen “You’re Takashi Shirogane! The pendejo that went missing in space! And your stupid fuck brother pulled some weird shit and dragged Lanzito into it and now he and Henry and some poor girl nobody even knew about are missing!”

“Oh?” Shiro spits a bit of blood out onto the tile “Is that what they’re telling people?”

Suddenly the girl is hanging over him and the pin is a lot closer to his eye than he wants it to be “What happened?”

Shiro casually knocks the pin from her hand and, seizing her by the wrist, pulls her to the tiles and pins her there beneath one knee. She screams a protest and tries to kick him, but Shiro has spent an embarrassingly huge amount of time wrestling with teens in the last couple of months, and immobilises her with another knee.

“Stop!” he shouts, sending a flash of pain through his temples “I don’t know what you’re doing here- in my goddamn house, and I don’t know what fucking business you think you’ve got attacking me, but I’ve been through a lot and I don’t deal very well with confrontations these days.”

“I’ll bite your fucking throat.” she hisses into the tiles “If you try anything funny-”

“What? Oh, Jesus! No! Of course not! I just don’t want you poking me in the eye with your pin!”

Shiro lets go of her. While she rolls away from him, coughing and swearing, he grabs the pin off of the tiles and chucks it over his head. There is a clink of metal as it lands in the chrome-plated sink. 

“Which one are you?”

The girl grabs the edge of the kitchen table and pulls herself up “What?”

“Which one are you? Which of Lance’s sisters?”

The mention of his name makes her face collapse, and breaks Shiro’s heart a little bit “I’m Flores-Irena.”

Shiro rubs his throbbing temples. Though his entire brain feels like a wound that has just had its scab peeled off, he makes the connection “His big sister. The one who pushed him down a hill in a trash can.”

Flores-Irena claps a hand over her mouth “Where is he? What did you do to Lanzáro?”

“Nothing. God.” he bows his head “God.”

He never thought he’d be explaining Voltron to anybody without actual Voltron there as a visual aid. And his fellow Paladins, and Allura, and Coran and his majestic facial hair providing that grounding presence so Shiro doesn’t lose his shit completely as he is, for the first time, forced to detail and justify this adventure to other rational human beings.

“Is he dead?”

“No.” says Shiro, though he is not sure.   
The last thing he remembers is Zarkon, reaching into his lion through the cerebral back-door provided by his and Boss Ma’ams mental connection. Pushing Zarkon back. The whiplash when the door slammed on Zarkon. The agony of it. Before that incredible pain smudged him out of the world, Voltron was battling something impossible and terrible and they probably beat the pulp out of it, knowing Shiro’s kids, but who knows what has happened since then?  
He told Keith to lead Voltron in the event that he went missing- which he’s apparently going to make a habit out of. God, please God, say that Keith did so. And please say that Lance and Allura are helping him, otherwise Voltron is going to turn into an impulsive mess and they’re not going to get anything done.

“What happened?” Flores-Irena’s voice has softened some what. She staggers and drops into the nearest chair. She is on the verge of tears.

Shiro meets her eyes at last “Do you believe in aliens?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yet another female character shoe-horned into this fic at the expense of...I don't know, a pace that moves in a timely fashion? That's six new women, count 'em, six! 
> 
> Kolivan's surname is pronounced like 'Carlyle', which both know is stupid and do not regret. And Shiro's made a new friend, huh? Has anybody else ever had a close call with a hijabi friend's scarf pin? Cos I've nearly had my eye taken out before.


	13. Not the way Shiro usually spends his Friday nights

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Season 5 is coming. How many of my treasured headcanons will survive the onslaught of feels? Only time will tell. For now, let us enjoy our innocence of the horrors that march our way.

Once upon a time, Shiro was innocent of the amount of intricate, furtive planning that went into rebellions. He was satisfied with the illusion that rights movements and rebellions could be spontaneous, romantic things largely steered by young idealists who were equally romantic and spontaneous. Well, having to run a rebellion of his own has certainly disabused him of that notion. 

The cause for a rebellion was already there. Voltron provided the momentum when it began tearing through the Galra forces, pushing back its fiercest soldiers and most alarming perversions of nature that Haggar’s hell-lab steadily pushes out. All that momentum needed was careful, intelligent management to ensure the efforts of the freedom fighters were being spent in the most strategically beneficial way.   
Naturally the people which were to represent the Coalition had to, themselves, represent all that was good and free and promising of a future free from oppression or abuse. Whether or not the person acting as the figurehead actually did that much for the organisation beyond the simple duties of a figurehead (promoting the cause at specific times, at specific places and times, then going down for a nap while the revolution ticked on without them) mattered little in who was chosen. In Voltron’s case Allura, the face of the Coalition, was a convenient manifestation of the general grief that runs rampant in the empire- a long lost princess, rising from her grave to push back against the forces which had consigned her and billions of others to death by war or the slow, methodical genocide which comes after it.

The fact that Allura also piloted Guapa was just a bonus.

Of course, the fantasy-smashing reality is that no rebellion has ever been run by one charismatic figure. Allura splits her time between shooting the empire to shit with Guapa and diplomatic meetings with the leaders of recently freed peoples, but as important as that may be to the effort, if she died tomorrow then all they would have to do is slap Lance back in Guapa, steal Keith’s ass back from the Blade, and have Shiro step into fill her shoes. Everybody loves Shiro. Brilliant warrior that was forced to prove himself on an intergalactic scale as the Champion and qualified to represent popular unrest because of that. Apparently he is also in possession of one of those faces that is just so universally satisfying Voltron has yet to encounter a culture which would not describe Shiro as attractive. 

It would hurt to move on without Allura. But Voltron could, just as they’d made do in Shiro’s absence and are currently making do with Keith available to them only by communicator. With the idea that Shiro might have to become the new Allura one day, he makes sure he pays attention to what she does.

A dizzying amount of that initial diplomacy actually happens in medbays or squatting behind the Coalition’s lines as the dust of the battle settles. Rare is the occasion that Allura visits another leader’s home, be that a castle, a presidential palace or the alien equivalent of a modest starter home. But when she does? You can bet she’ll wake Shiro up, no matter the hour, cram him into some clothing that gels with the general level of opulence of the place they’re visiting, toss him into Guapa with a neck-pillow and the instruction to get his shit together by the time they land.  
Fewer and fewer weeks go by where Shiro is not woken by the slight aura of menace Allura exudes as she stands at the end of his mattress, brandishing something like a pantsuit that makes him double-take every time he passes a reflective surface because he was convinced he was Janelle Monae.

 

Tonight, Shiro expected a reprieve from diplomacy duties to worry himself to sleep. Yesterday, Hunk handed Keith (and Lotor) a high-risk mission without consulting anyone else first. If ever there were a time when Shiro was genuinely afraid he might lose control and murder one of the kids, it was a couple of hours ago when Hunk casually informed him that Keith was about to hijack a sensitive piece of information from a Galra ship coincidentally passing over Chornea. To Shiro’s credit, all he gave Hunk was a gentle reprimand for going to Keith with the problem idea before bouncing it off of the rest of Voltron. What he really wanted to do was pick Hunk up and toss him shot-put style through the bridge’s windshield.  
This feeling was compounded when Hunk corrected him, saying that he had briefly run the idea past Lance, just to make sure he wasn’t being a complete idiot.

Now, theoretically, Shiro loves Lance. When Lance isn’t tripping people up by stretching his goddamn endless legs into their path or saying something so horribly cheesy, so horribly reminiscent of Shiro himself when he had that difficult phase in high-school, Shiro loves Lance. But Shiro would not trust Lance to lead himself out of a dark room, much less to be the only advisor on a decision that could still end up having disastrous consequences for Voltron. For Keith.

The worst part? He thinks Lance knows that. After Shiro gave Hunk the world’s gentlest scolding for presenting Keith- fucking Keith, whose impulse control is equal to that of a puppy’s- with an exciting new way to injure himself, he caught Lance’s eye and, without really knowing what his face looked like, saw Lance’s expression change to resignation. He looked nauseous. As if he were afraid Shiro might rip into him right there and then in front of the rest of the team. Which, Shiro realises, is not an entirely unreasonable expectation because he has done it before. Not for something this serious, though.

In retrospect Shiro should have just hugged the poor kid. Lance is trying his best. 

Ok, Keith wants to play cops and robbers with the people he literally just hid from? Fine. He wants to take Lotor with him too, because for some fucking reason Kolivan had to pick fucking now of all fucking times to fuck the fuck off? Shiro can deal with that. 

Keith can make his own choices. He’s a big boy. He can make choices that affect the whole team while in a secret conference with Hunk, including the choice to put Lotor into danger of recapture by the empire though he could still prove valuable to Voltron. Shiro is fine with this. Shiro’s giving his baby brother room to grow and make his own decisions.

Tonight, when Allura came to get him, she came across him laying face down on the floor with a scream-muffling pillow placed over his face. He’d spent so long screaming into the pillow he not only fell asleep there, but came to with a sore throat.   
His sense of disorientation was exacerbated by the fact that Allura had borrowed one of Hunk’s shirts as a nightgown, which bore the slogan ‘A Cubano is a Cuban boy, not a sandwich’, and was using Lance’s eye-mask to put her hair in a sleeping braid. At first Shiro thought he was about to be suffocated by an assassin that had already killed the boys, taking some of their things for trophies.

It was only when she rasped at him “We leave in five minutes.” that he realised this was Allura standing on his bed, and not a crazed clothes-stealing goblin come to send him to meet the maker.

(Chornea)

Kolivan, perhaps sensing the young man whom he has taken under his wing is about to do something wildly stupid, calls just as Keith is easing the transport into the first layer of storm-clouds.

Swearing, Keith immediately brings the transport back out of the clouds, forced to hover dangerously in angry winds that could dash them against the mountain base at any moment. With one hand white-knuckled on the steering wheel he digs the communicator out “What?”

Lotor watches on in horror from the shotgun. He pushes a button on the armrest and an additional three seatbelts spring out of the back of the chair to further secure him. 

“Where are you right now?” the growl in Kolivan’s voice is a suspicious one. He knows he is mad at Keith, but has not yet figured out why.

“Where are you?” Keith shoots back, wrestling the ship forwards against a strong headwind.

“Exactly where I told you I would be. I’m on the Blade base-”

Keith wrenches the steering wheel hard to the left and narrowly misses being pushed into the storm clouds by an aggressive updraft “Are you talking to me during a meeting? Wow, Kolivan, you need to set a good example for the rest of the people. Bad enough that you’re running out on the Blade to babysit your apprentice and the prince-”

“You’re driving us into a thunderhead!” shouts Lotor.

A bit more wrestling with the steering wheel. Keith swears so hard he blurs the lines between Korean and Japanese to communicate his rage. 

“Don’t you raise your voice at me, young man!” Kolivan snaps “I know enough of your languages to know what at least half of that means and I take exception to-”

“Let me drive, for the love of Willow!”   
In a moment of mad bravery Lotor completely releases himself from the many seatbelts, leaving Keith with no choice but to do the same. The speed and agility with which the boys swap seats would make a pair of ballerinas jealous. 

Even so Keith nearly dashes his brains out against the dashboard. Lotor breaks very hard, tossing him back into the seat. His elbow joshes the button for the seatbelts and a second later Keith is secured so tightly to the seat he has trouble raising the communicator to his mouth.

“What was that?”

“Nothing!” says Keith too quickly “Stop accusing me of things, nothing is happening!”

“Don’t speak to me like you speak to Shiro. I’m not your brother and I’m not wrapped around your tiny, tiny finger the way he is. I’m your superior and I demand to know what in the hell that racket is.”

See, the council of sisters did Keith a solid by agreeing not to inform their father of what they were going to do. There’s some extra level of complexity to this situation Keith hasn’t quite grasped- something emotionally complicated and fraught. Perhaps it has to do with one of the generals? Keith has a horrible feeling somebody is related to somebody else they are not willing to actively fight against, but whatever the case is, he does not need to know the full situation. It’s not convenient or even safe by any means, but then again, Keith understands having a confused family dynamic and the feeling of violation and embarrassment when details are wrestled from him before he feels comfortable divulging them. 

Keith doesn’t want to tell Kolivan anything that might upset him or jeopardise the sisters’ secret. On the down side he has never been good at lying on the spot- usually he just stands in the way of his fuck up and raises his voice in the hopes he’ll just scare the confrontation off completely by acting like a lunatic.  
But like Kolivan says, what works with Shiro is not guaranteed to work with him.

“Lotor just fell down the stairs.”

Lotor, now handling the ship with remarkable care and skill, fixes Keith with a filthy look.

Keith puts a hand up as a blinder “Two flights of them.”

Kolivan is silent for just a moment. In the background, Keith can hear the familiar, comforting ruckus naturally made when a bunch of Blades who don’t normally see each other are getting some hang-time. To the untrained ear it would sound like a bunch of very large cats demanding treats. Keith has gotten to the point where he can understand the most basic noises issuing from his superiors. They’re pretty much the Galra equivalent of the noises Hunk and Lance make when they see each other when they spend more than six hours apart.

“Is he injured?”

“No. No, he’s fine.”

A thunderclap rings out. Feels like it boomed out right inside of Keith’s ear. Wincing, he hunches his shoulders up over his ears “Third flight now! Wow, shit, I better go help him. I mean not that I don’t like watching Lotor fall down stairs but I gotta make sure he hasn’t broken a bone!”

“Keith, you could not tell me a convincing lie if a gun were to your temple-”

Unthinkingly, Keith blurts out “Bye! Love you!”   
It is only when he has hung up and tossed the communicator towards the back of the little transport that he realises what he just said. Oh Lord. Oh God. Why does he always emote at the most inappropriate times?

Lotor is staring at him, perhaps fascinated by the redness of the blood rising to his face.

“Just drive.” Keith snaps.

(A planet. The name of which Shiro was told on the way over, but has already forgotten)

Apart from being ‘the cute one’ and the leader and Allura’s shadow at impromptu diplomatic gatherings, Shiro also deals with a lot of the military admin. Allura is the figurehead who forges the basis of the relationship either in her armour or in a fantastic dress while Shiro tries not to doze off on her arm, then Coran implements the agreement by the swapping of troops or funds or information, then Shiro must wake up in time to actually organise the battles. He makes sure rebellions are getting support when and where they need it (involving a lot more triage than he is comfortable with), figures out which governments are going to be ok to operate outside of the colonial structure, and which ones were too closely linked or monitored by the empire to stand on their own.  
Makes Shiro wish one of his PhDs was based on post-colonialist self-determination. Physics is all well and good, but the practical applications to Voltron’s work is surprisingly minimal. Rarely does it help him pilot better. Hell, Lance admits to having tuned out of most of his math classes at the Garrison and it barely shows in his flying. Hunk never flew so much as a remote-controlled drone before he got into Kitty’s cockpit and now he flies with more panache and skill than half of the Garrison could ever hope to. On earth Pidge would need to use platform boots and a phone book before she had a hope of grazing the dashboard of the average car, but in space she’s allowed to drive a giant robot cat without so much as a learner’s permit.

“At least I can toast bread with my prosthetic.” 

Allura gives him an odd look “What?”

Realising he said this out loud, Shiro gives his head a shake and sits straight up in his seat “Nothing.”

“No, that was something. You were talking about dread.”

“I said ‘bread’.”

Allura rolls her eyes “Are you hungry again? It’s only been two hours since we left the castle. How your species became apex predators with such wildly inefficient guts, I’ll never understand.”

Shiro is saved from having to explain the evolution of apposable thumbs to Allura by the reappearance of the Notomocha ambassador. While the Notomocha convened inside, Allura, Shiro and the Taujeer representatives have been waiting outside on a pleasantly breezy patio that overlooks the Notomocha capitol, which Shiro immediately took a picture of and sent to the Paladins’ group-chat to see if anyone else thought the place looked like it was built out of Lego. Hunk and Lance agreed. Pidge, ever eager to prove herself the smartest in all areas, not just science, shot back by saying it reminded her of pre-Colombian architecture, specifically Teotihuacan. Last time Shiro looked at the chat Lance was trying to get Pidge to record herself pronouncing the name correctly.   
The Lego version of Teotihuacan is a pretty, clean place, but not as busy as a place of its size should be. A good part of the population were wiped out by some sort of virulent strain of space-flu a decade ago and the planet has been struggling to repopulate the city with so many of their young and brilliant being drafted into this lab or that military unit by the empire. Today, Allura and Shiro hope to strike a deal with the Notomocha to allow the displaced Taujeer to settle here and share the city.

Allura passes an arm around his shoulder and yawns “If this doesn’t work then we’re going to have to go straight off to the next viable planet. Are you up for that?”

Shiro considers this for a moment “Did you move the stash of space-coffee I put in Guapa’s glovebox.”

“I keep telling you, it’s called morti-mort juice-”

“If you didn’t then you’ve got yourself a functioning Shiro for the next,” Shiro checks his communicator for the time “Three hours. Maybe four.”

Shiro had a vague idea they could be out for a while when Allura bundled him into Guapa at 2.a.m. By the time he was aware of having left his bed Allura had somehow already gotten him dressed in a formal Altean robe and belted him into the shotgun seat that occasionally pops out of Guapa’s floor for company.  
She put a hairbrush in his lap and thanked him for arranging the meeting. Shiro had, of course, completely forgotten that he had, because over the course of an average day he arranges about eighteen meetings for a variety of reasons. But he knew he was safe in forgetting. Allura has an impeccable memory for important dates and times and is not afraid of waking Shiro up or berating him when his PTSD-fried brain does let something slip. Had she been the one raising Keith, Shiro is certain she would have never forgotten to pick him up from aikido, stranding him in the middle of the city in the evening with nothing but a lost-puppy look to get the bus drivers on his side.

Still stings to think about that one. 

At the ambassador’s approach, Allura stands. She, Shiro and the Taujeer were invited to wait on some benches made of squishy rock benches while the fate of 30,400 people was decided behind closed doors. There was not enough room to fit both of them on the tiny bench, but Allura refused to make Shiro sit on the ground, citing sexism for putting the male to extra trouble for the comfort of the female (she’s started to absorb all sorts of lessons in human feminist theory from Lance and Hunk), so she has to get out of his lap to greet the Notomocha.  
Shiro grabs onto the back of her dress to stand, with his leg asleep and threatening to teeter out from under him.

“The Council of Elders has come to a decision,” while the Notomocha woman pauses for effect, Shiro finds himself wondering why so many societies have Councils of Elders in charge. Seems like it would be discouraging to young people wanting to get into politics “The Taujeer will be allowed to stay. There will be no conditions. There will be no limits as to the level of integration that will be allowed. We ask that representatives of the Taujeer government join our Council to realise this transition as best as possible.”

The leader of the Taujeer- somebody who, to Shiro’s earthling eyes, looks far too young to be leading the remainders of their people- brushes past Allura and shakes the smooth paddle of the Notomocha woman’s hand.  
“Let us not repeat the mistakes and tyranny of the oligarchy which condemned us all to this miserable half-existence in the first place.”

Polite applause. Shiro joins in, though that comment makes him feel more like laying down and weeping than it does celebrating. Relief, too, comes over him in a great emotional wave that puts the sting of tears in his eyes again. 30,400 people have been rehomed less than two days after their home was razed to the ground. Better than anything he could have ever hoped for on earth. People really take care of each other in space.

No doubt there will be some sort of celebration after the rehousing has gotten underway, maybe even a little bit of drinking among the higher-ups tonight, but he and Allura will be back at the castle by the time the first casks of space-wine makes the rounds.   
While Allura discusses the most immediate needs of the city, whose population has suddenly been doubled, Shiro slinks into a shadow and pulls his communicator out of one of the many pockets hidden in his formal robes. 

Shiro crouches and waits, his heart in his throat, for his brother to pick up the communicator. He won’t be gone just yet. There’s still a little time before Keith and Prince Hairtor make their sneak-attack on the ship passing over Chornea.

A little time to talk him out of it, maybe.

Knowing it is him, Keith answers in Japanese “What? I haven’t got much time.”

“Kolivan isn’t back yet?”

“We don’t need Kolivan for this.”

‘We’, thinks Shiro. That’s interesting.  
“What you need to be is careful, gecko. I don’t think this is a good idea.”

Already he can sense Keith is hiding something from him. There’s something in the weight of his pauses. When they were younger and Keith had broken something in the next room and wanted to keep Shiro out of it without also giving himself away, Keith would hover awkwardly in the doorframe and just sort of…bellow whatever came to his mind. Every time Shiro made to move past him Keith would bounce him back with the same tense, wired expression on his face, like a deer psyching itself up to cross a busy freeway and raise his voice by a couple of octaves.

Shiro can practically smell his brother’s chemical panic from the other end of the connection “What? What went wrong?”

“Nothing!” exclaims Keith “God, do you trust me at all? I can handle things! I can handle everything! I’m not a goddamn baby you need a babysitter for, alright?”

Shiro not want to get into a fight tonight, but if this is what it takes to keep his brother from dashing into the on-coming traffic and going the way of Bambi’s mother…  
“Don’t you raise your voice at me, young man! The fuck exactly are you taking issue with? I’m not treating you like a baby, I’m treating you like a goddamn team-member whose health and well-being I can ask after without getting my head bitten off! Now is that ok with you?”

He notices Allura giving him a look over her shoulder. No one else seems perturbed by the fact that a Paladin is squatting in the dark, whispering furiously into his communicator, but then, no one else knows to watch out for Shiro stuffing himself into corners to make furtive and angry calls. 

“Fucking fine.”

In the background some other voice says something indistinct. It must be Lotor. There’s a lot of noise, actually, so Lotor has to shout to make himself heard. What sort of place is Keith in? Sounds like Thor doing a solo on the world’s biggest drum-set.

“I gotta go, Shiro. We’re about to break orbit. Look, I’m sorry I shouted. I’m just nervous.”

“How do you think I feel?”

“I don’t know.”

“Nervous,” Shiro grinds a knuckle across his eyes “I’m nervous too, gecko.”

He can hear the smile in Keith’s voice “Stop calling me that.”

Allura is trying to catch his attention. He holds up a finger to indicate he needs a minute more. “Ok Kiko. Just be safe, ok?”

“I will, Nerdashi. Love you.”

“Shiro!” she shouts. He gestures for her to be quiet.

“Love you too.”

A second after he hangs up, Allura has put her foot in between his shoulder blades and is using him as a launching pad. Shiro instinctively squares his shoulders to support her. Allura jumps an impossible height, which ends up being about the eye-level of the misshapen beast that must have been creeping up on Shiro for the last couple of minutes.   
Shiro would smack himself for being so stupidly unaware of the danger if there wasn’t a risk that he might behead himself.

Allura has no weapon but her fists, which prove more than a match for whatever the hell the monster’s skull is made of. She clasps her hands together, haloed in the blue light of her weird wizard magic, and brings them down hard between the monster’s eyes. Its skull does not so much break as it does explode into dozens of wet, meaty pieces. Her momentum knocks the body back. Its insides spill all over the far side of the patio. Allura lands heavily on the beast’s chest, promptly putting her foot through the flesh.

“Shit on my quiznak!” she grabs at her stuck ankle, gathering the skirts of her dress up in her teeth so she can see better.

Shiro snaps into action mode “Can I ask everyone to move inside, please? Activate your lock-down protocols and please alert whatever local security you’ve got.”

Thank God these people know not to panic. They gather up on the other side of the massive patio and file calmly but quickly back into the hall while Allura frees herself from the fleshy monstrosity. By the time the blast-doors have snapped shut over the hall, Shiro can hear the growls of things with mangled throats converging from all directions.

He offers Allura a hand down from the beast’s chest. She accepts and sets about tying her skirts out of the way as soon as her feet are on the ground “Quintessence beasts. I cannot believe it! The empire has never touched this planet before because of the plague years, and now of all times, they pick to drop quintessence beasts on us?”

“They’re doing another last-minute sabotage.” Shiro shrugs his robes off and hangs them up on the back of one of the squishy benches. This leaves him to fight in a pair of hideous yoga pants and a tank that says ‘Beware of Cook’- he has really got to learn to tell his and Hunk’s clothes apart when it’s his turn to do the folding.   
Oh and it’s cold out. Very cold. No doubt the battle will warm him up, but Shiro angles himself a bit away from Allura to avoid headlighting her for now.

 

She ends up putting her back to his and surveying the dusk-lit grounds. It is hard to see anything in the pale green gloom that precedes the night of this planet. Hearing what is coming, however, is easy enough. 

“How did they do it?” Shiro spots a set of milky eyes that stand at least nine metres over the ground “How in the hell did we not notice this?”

“I don’t know! Must have done a seeding before we got here.”

A seeding is when some unlucky grunt is tasked with bombing an area of enemy or neutral territory with a bunch of freshly-baked monsters from Haggar’s quintessence kitchen. The monsters are unloaded from the back of a ship like a bunch of evil chickens falling off the back of a truck, and free to wreak whatever havoc on the local population it is within their means to wreak.

“How did they know we were going to be here?”

Allura raises her fists. This time, in a boxing stance she has used many times during their sparring matches “Maybe this attack isn’t for us.”

“Oh yeah? They don’t do this shit often, Al. I think this is for us.”  
A sharp pain in Shiro’s temple reminds him just how tired he is under the flush of adrenalin. Then, when his nose suddenly begins to flow, Shiro is tempted to pass out right there and then. Let Allura do her badass princess fisticuffs thing over his unconscious corpse.

Shiro shakes his head. He doesn’t care that it flings his blood all over the place “Got your whip?”

“I left it on Guapa’s seat.”

“Al, you bean.”

She joshes his side with her elbow “You take the ones on the right. I’ll do the left. If it gets really bad, run for Guapa.” 

“Too much to ask that she helps us out, huh?”

Allura raises her voice “I love my girl, but she’s a lazy bitch.”  
This tapers off into a growl. Shiro knows she has her lips peeled back now, that a set of fangs have descended from her gums in preparation for the scrap. It’s the same face she makes when she’s going for the same piece of food as him. 

And then the darkness grows teeth and pounces on them in a howling fury.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was tempted to say that Shiro was topless under his robes, but that boy grew up in Chicago according to this fic. He dresses in layers. Also it seemed a bit pointless to have him darting around with his perfect pecs rippling when I could put him in a goofy shirt.


	14. Like hell-raising mother, like hell-raising son.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me: No matter what happens in season 5 I think I'm happy to stick to the basic plotlines I've already mapped out for the fic  
> Season 5: *gives me Krolia*  
> Me: Well. Fuck. 
> 
> So this chapter took extra long because I actually had the majority of one done up before I ended up watching Season 5. A couple of the events from the new material should make it into this story now- everybody get hype for the time Lotor goes to the Kral Vera and fucks it up worse than he actually did canonically! Also, Krolia? Ok. Ok, there's already too many random female characters floating around in this fic, but how can I not include the progenitor of our favourite Mullet Samurai? 
> 
> CW: Trans character addressed by biological pronouns. But is also an infant. So it's not transphobia his family just doesn't know better yet.

(19 years earlier)

Kolivan and Acxa have to drop everything when the news comes through. It’s in the middle of the goddamn night on New Daibazaal, but a family emergency waits for no one. Thace is roused and summoned from his covert mission on a nearby military base to babysit the girls. He manages to make it over only fifteen minutes after Acxa calls him, half-hysterical, and this includes the time it takes him to make excuses to his superiors as to why one of the lieutenants needs to run out of the base just after midnight without changing out of his sleeping clothes. As soon as his transport screeches into the driveway, Acxa and Kolivan have dashed out the door.

“The girls are all in bed!” Acxa dives into the driver’s seat and fumbles with the ignition “Except for Lallia! When I heard it was my mother on my communicator I, uh…”

Kolivan hops into the shotgun seat “She screamed. Lallia woke up. She’s drooling in front of the TV right now- just don’t let her turn it to the Gladiator live-stream, alright?”

Thace waves them off “Go on! Give your mother my love. And the baby. It’s a queen?”

“So far! Bye Dad, love you!” Kolivan shouts out the window as they peel out of the driveway, putting down a couple of scorch-marks. 

Sagging in the doorframe, Thace sighs and is about to go inside when he feels a tug on the sleeve of his robe. He looks down and meets Lallia’s big, sleepy eyes.

“Grandad,” she yawns “What’s a spread-legged quiznakker?”

Thace winces “Ask your mother when she gets home. Let’s go inside.”

Lallia brightens “Can I watch the gladiators?”

“Kitten, if you want to watch people fight to the death for your entertainment, we can wake up your sisters and tell them there’s only one space-pudding left in the house.”

While Thace and the youngest of his grand-daughters settle in for some late-night intergalactic soap operas, Acxa peels down the quiet streets and airways of New Daibazaal like a drunken university student trying to outrun the cops. Briefly she does end up neck-in-neck with a police cruiser because of a reckless change between the terrestrial and the aerial lane.   
That situation is quickly defused when she pops her head out of the window and bellows “My husband is in labour!”

In fact, the pair of cops become concerned for them and offer an escort all the way to the hospital to Acxa can cut through what little traffic there is on the streets at this time of the night. Kolivan is therefore obliged to paw in the back-seat for Kolivan’s spare uniform and stuff it up his shirt in the approximation of a pregnant belly. He gives a decent impression of a pregnant man in pain right up until the reception, where the cops wish them luck with the birthing and a long life for the baby. The moment the cruiser is out of sight, Kolivan pulls Thace’s uniform out of his shirt and, ignoring the weird look from the receptionist, asks for Krolia Krogane.  
The receptionist knows to ask questions. It’s common knowledge among everyone (except the authorities who might actually do something with the information) that the room Krolia has been stashed away in is used by Marmora when an injured member needs hospital-level treatment and isn’t within the immediate reach of a base. The injured Blade sends out a brief distress signal to the nearest agent and gets picked up by them, then delivered to the hospital as if they are any other poor unfortunate, and not a member of a group of intergalactic freedom fighters that probably got hurt while committing an act of treason against the empire. 

For reasons known only to Krolia she decided she would rather send her distress signal to Ulaz, even though her daughter, son-in-law and his father were all within range, and swore Ulaz into the secrecy the moment he picked her out of the wreckage. Krolia must have known how angry this would make Acxa, because she opened the conversation with “Don’t kill Ulaz but I’ve been on New Daibazaal for a couple of days now…”

Krolia only called them twenty minutes ago. Therefore she is surprised when Acxa slams shoulder-first into the door and spills into the room, Kolivan tripping after her. 

Krolia pushes herself up onto her elbows in bed “How did you get here so fast?”

Acxa staggers over to the bed, holding herself up on the hover-IV which appears to have just been disconnected from Krolia “Police escort. Kolivan pretended he was in labour. Let me see her.”

Krolia gestures to a bassinet floating beside her. Acxa quickly circles the bed. All it takes is one glimpse of the little bundle inside and she bursts into silent tears. Her face contorts. She becomes so comically ugly that Krolia and Kolivan forget the solemnity of the occasion. Kolivan cracks up. Krolia laughs as best as the bandages around her chest and ribcage will allow her, which sets the baby off. Babies laughing is one thing which is sure to make Acxa just wail- which she does. She brings the baby’s hand to her mouth and kisses the little forehead as she sobs. 

“That’s the face I fell in love with.” says Kolivan.

Acxa is totally unashamed “She’s perfect. She’s so little and squished- oh my gods, she’s looking at me! Oh, she’s got the same eyes as me! Look at her nose!”

Krolia scratches at the wrap of bandages about her chest “I thought you would pick up on the colouring right away. She’s not even a bit Galra-coloured.”

Kolivan perches on the edge of the bed beside Acxa, grinning into the bassinet “So? Porrxis looked like a furry Altean until she was three cycles old.”

The baby is properly awake now. She seems aware that the people hanging over her bassinet are not her mother. But she also seems to know that one of these people is not too far removed from being her mother, because her little face crumples into a gummy grin and wrestles a chubby hand from her swaddling to grab at Acxa’s thumb.

Now Acxa is beginning to realise what problem her mother alluded to over the phone. While the baby looks very much like Acxa and Krolia, she does not look at all Galra. There is no hint of Krolia’s marking. Her skin has only the barest dusting of peach-fuzz where there should be soft kitten fur and the stuff on top of her head, the weird jet black of her fluffy hair is nothing close to the texture or colouring of Galra hair.   
The average mixed-heritage Galra kitten starts to get teeth around four cycles and teeth during the next. But Krolia says this baby is a whole eight cycles old and she shows no signs of developing either. Her fingernails are blunt. Her teeth are just not there. Her ears are squashed little things huddled far down on the sides of her skull, which, Krolia warns her, is still very soft and has to be handled with the utmost care. 

Acxa’s new little sister is the most alarmingly useless infant any of them have ever seen. 

Handling her like she is made of spun sugar, Acxa takes her sister from the bassinet and sits her up on her knee. Her own children were more than able to sit up on their own at this age. The baby, on the other hand, starts to slip sideways each time Acxa tentatively pulls her hands away. Acxa can see the baby doing her best to sit up. Her little body simply doesn’t have the strength. 

“She’s completely human.” surmises Acxa.

Krolia taps her own temple “Our eyes, remember? But apart from that she is. She’s…I’ve been waiting for eight cycles for her to show any signs of being- of being anything but human.”

“Nothing?” asks Kolivan.

“Nothing.”

There’s a moment of uncomfortable silence. A thick, oppressive awareness of what is going to happen next. The moment Acxa heard her baby sister burbling underneath her mother’s voice she knew what horrible thing Krolia is going to ask of her.

To stall the inevitable question, Acxa reluctantly passes the baby over to Kolivan and takes stock of her mother’s injuries “All of this from a ship crash?”

Krolia grimaces “Nobody crashes a ship like I do, kitten. That and I had to kill somebody.”

“Oh for quiznak’s sake, Mother! Who?”

Krolia gestures to the baby, who has become fascinated with Kolivan’s hair and is trying to gnaw on the tip of his braid “I told you I had to piggyback a signal to let the Blade know we were coming in. It wasn’t a secure line, but it was an emergency, so I picked the closest one there was. When the ship crashed the owner of the frequency came down out of his tower to see what the hell was going on, didn’t he? And I couldn’t let him see my bedraggled, Blade uniform-wearing ass just standing around with a human baby on me, could I?”

“How the hell did Ulaz manage to hide your crashed ship and the tom you killed?” Kolivan breaks off with a gasp of delight because the baby has lost interest in his ears and popped the tip of his thumb into her mouth.   
His eyes start to tear up as well, which is rare, considering he was dry-eyed at the birth of every one of his own daughters. Even when he was the one giving birth. 

“He’s talented. He’d be wonderful step-father material. I’ve been telling Thace exactly that for thirty decaphoebs, and they still treat each other like awkward kit-hood crushes. Anyway, I don’t want you to antagonise him for this, Acxa. He’s been wonderful. He and that kitten he has with him- Antok, I think.”

“The amphibian kid?”

Krolia nods “She loved the baby. Absolutely enamoured.”

Acxa wants to smack her mother in the face right then. Really? Antok the Blade apprentice knew about Acxa’s baby sister before she did?  
However, she is aware their time together will be limited “What’s her name?”

“I just told you it’s Antok.”

Acxa glowers at her mother.

“Oh, you mean the baby?”

“No, Mother, please tell me more about Ulaz’s apprentice. Clearly she’s the one I’m interested in right now.”

“It’s Acxias.”

Acxa claps a hand to her forehead “Mother! You promised me you’d never be one of those parents!”

Krolia bristles “What’s wrong with Acxias?”

“It’s my goddamn name but with an ‘i’ and an ‘s’!”

“Yes, thanks, I noticed that! I like your name. Acxa’s a wonderful name. Why wouldn’t I use a slightly different version of it for my other child?”

“For the same reason we didn’t just name Lallia something like, quiznakking, Porrxa, or Porxxias! It’s lazy! It’s insulting to the baby! It’s like, ‘whoops, you were unplanned, let’s just slap your big sister’s name on you and call that good’!”

“You should have heard what Tex wanted to call her! I had to talk him down from ‘Eugenia’! The human name he gave her is terrible too, gods forgive me for saying so! What the quiznak would you have called her?”

“Something other than Acxias! Why not honour one of your fallen comrades? Why not call her after one of our very much alive friends right now? Thace! There, that’s a good name, why didn’t you just name her Thace?”

“If you like Thace so much then one of you had better get knocked up again and call the new kid that, because this one is staying Acxias.”

Unaware of the volley passing over his head, Kolivan is entranced by the tiny foot that has just popped out of the bottom of the swaddling. He cups Acxias’s foot and stares, whispering “Where are your toe-beans?”

Luckily for Kolivan and Acxias, the women quickly run out of steam and deflate into a tense, panting truce. Krolia grasps at her chest. It is painful to shout. Doesn’t quite feel like all of the bone-shards have been dug out of her pulmonary tissues, but that’s something to worry about later. 

Krolia reaches towards her daughter. Automatically, Acxa grasps her mother’s hand and squeezes.

“She can’t stay with us.”

Acxa closes her eyes, and Kolivan grows still “What are you asking me to do?”

Krolia turns her face to the wall “I want you to take her back to earth. Take her back to Tex. Tell him to give her the knife so she’ll know who I am when I come back- and make sure he knows I’ll come back to her.”

Kolivan swallows with difficulty “Just to her?”

Krolia is silent. 

“Are you sure you want to do this?”

“No,” says Krolia thickly “I don’t want to leave her on earth. I don’t want to strand her on Earth so far away from half of her people and half of her culture, but this empire is not safe for her. If she were an Altean baby it would be different. But she’s so weak. I couldn’t leave her alone for a minute. Somebody could take her from me and kill her entirely on accident, never mind on purpose. I couldn’t even let her play with her nieces because they’re so much stronger than she is. I couldn’t let her play with other children. Or leave her alone with people who don’t know exactly how carefully they have to handle her. Every minute of every day would be a battle against the odds for her and that’s just not fair when there’s a world where she could survive so much more easily. Have a life, I mean.”  
And even if she survives childhood, what then? She’s tossed onto the battlefield to die fighting a tyrant? I don’t want that for her. I didn’t want that for you, Acxa. If there had been a place where I could have put you when you were a baby…it doesn’t matter how much I would have missed you. It doesn’t matter how much you would have missed me. I just can’t make this world safe for her, Acxa. She isn’t made for this empire.”

At last, Krolia looks back to her daughter. Acxa wipes her sleeve across her mother’s eyes.

“This empire isn’t made for her.” finishes Acxa “So we take her to one that is. Alright, Mother. Whatever Acxias needs.”

 

Hacking the airlock proves a lot easier with Lotor around, much as Keith hates to admit it. Keith’s current technique for getting airlocks to open without alerting the people inside of the ship of the unauthorised EVA involves careful lock-picking, a lot of cussing and is so time-consuming it runs a serious risk of getting him caught, if only for the sheer goddamn amount of time he has to crouched on the hull his target ship. But as the prince of the empire Lotor is privy to a skeleton-key code of sorts. Apparently, Galra authorities like to use the skeleton code to sneak in and out of their command ships to private meetings where they plot the downfall of an enemy general, or, conversely use it to sneak their fellow conspirators onto their own ship.

“Or a lover.” says Lotor just as the airlock door drifts open “I’ve caught Zethrid sneaking one of her girlfriends onboard before. My gods, that woman has a harem to put the richest sultan to shame. And none of them seem to know about the others. I don’t know how she does it.”

They squeeze into the airlock together. Keith closes the door slowly to avoid making a noise. Then, when he moves back to make room for the heavy locking mechanism on the inside of the door, he realises how little room there is inside. This particular airlock seems to have been designed for use of one person at a time. Not two young men, skinny as one of them may be. Keith silently decides he is going to pretend that he is not squished against Lotor in a position that would make Lance screech (with jealousy, he wonders, or delight? Both?). Independently Lotor seems to come to the same decision, because he doesn’t complain as he is forced to take a kneel roughly level with Keith’s crotch to open the other lock.  
For once Keith is glad the armour makes packing uncomfortable. If he’d been packing today then Lotor would be suffering through the unspeakable sensation of having something distinctly dick-shaped poking him in the back of the neck. 

“I don’t exactly blame her. Zethrid got very bored very easily. Either she took it out violently, or she took it out, ah, in a more intimate manner. She had a girlfriend in almost every port. It was all I could do most of the time to keep her from running head-first into her woman’s arms’ the moment our ship made planet-fall.”

Keith has aimed his eyes up at the squat ceiling to spare himself the image of Lotor’s head in between his thighs “Why are you telling me this?” 

“Oh, I’m just making conversation. Trying to get to know you and all. You’ve spent most of the week actively avoiding me. I figured if I shared some ridiculous anecdote you might respond in kind and we could form some sort of understanding from there.”

Oh, there’s an understanding between them alright. In the last thirty seconds Lotor has managed to get more intimate with Keith’s body than his last boyfriend did in the first month of serious dating. One week the man is Keith’s mortal enemy. The next he and Keith are jammed together in an airlock and Keith is wondering if it makes him a bad person that he wishes Lance were here instead. 

“Let’s maybe not talk about your general’s harem right now.”

“Ex-general.” says Lotor.

“Ex-general. Which one was Zethrid?”

“The large one. She probably tried to snap you in half over her head? She enjoys doing that. It was only last decaphoeb that I got her to stop sucking the spine-marrow out of her victims. That sort of grisly thing doesn’t gel well with the form of diplomacy I was trying to promote. Ah, there we go.”

Mercifully the second door swings open onto an empty hallway. Lotor slithers outside and plasters himself against the wall. Keith creeps out of the airlock slowly, peering down the length of the hallway. He can hear a lot of voices not too far away and on the far wall, the spindly sort of shadow that belongs only to a druid. There’s also an electric feel to the air which penetrates through the armour like the Chicago winter through a single-glazed window pane.   
Great. Keith wasn’t expecting this.

“Have you ever fought a druid before?” hisses Keith.

Lotor thinks for a moment “Not formally.”

“What does that mean?”

“I mean, I’ve never had to defend myself from one in a real battle.”

The boys both fall silent as a couple of muttering Galra soldiers run across the hallway. They don’t so much as glance in their direction. Keith catches the words ‘goddamn witch’ as the last of them disappears.

“So you’ve sparred with a druid?” presses Keith “What do I have to watch for?”

“No, I didn’t spar with them.”

Keith hopes his glare carries through his mask “Did you murder them or something?”

“No. It’s just, when I was first out of stasis. I wasn’t being treated with anything close to respect at the time, but I was still expected to carry out some royal duties. One day I had to speak with Haggar and one of her druids tried to block my way, so I had to sort of, gently remind them of my power, and headbutt them-”

“Are you being serious right now?”

“Deadly!”

“Did…did it work?”

Lotor nods.

“They’re vulnerable to headbutts. Alright. Fuck, fuck, fuck, great.”

And then a familiar voice booms out, reverberating through Keith’s entire body “Acxa! Where did your daughter put the damn manifesto? It’s not in the drawer!”

“Quiznak.” says Lotor.

“Sendak.” growls Keith. 

Sendak tromps into the passageway. The levitating prosthetic has doubled in size since Keith last saw him. He seems to be in rude health for a man who was last seen evacuated ass-first into space because the mere sight of his ugly face gave Shiro such an almighty panic attack that he forgot his responsibility to put Voltron before his own needs. The stuff tucked up inside Sendak’s twisted head would have been super useful to have when Voltron was just starting out, but hey, Shiro freaked out.

Not as bad as Keith freaks out though. He sees the organic hand swinging at Sendak’s side and all he can think of how likely it is that those claws were the ones to scar his brother across the bridge of the nose. Maybe they even held him down while his arm was taken away. 

Sendak has just the barest glimpse of the tiniest Blade of Marmora he has ever seen seething out of the shadows shortly before a kneecap is planted firmly into his face. Meanwhile, Lotor, stunned and awed by the leap that Keith just managed from a standing position, can only stand there with an open jaw as Keith wraps his legs around Sendak’s neck and proceeds to choke the man out between his ankles. Sendak claws fruitlessly at the Keith’s legs- the uniform is made too slippery to get claws into for situations like this one. 

“Sendak?” comes a higher voice, this one sounding feminine and a little timid.

Lotor is suddenly aware that Keith is attempting to kill a man with his ankles in plain sight and, just reacting at this point, bolts over, seizes Sendak by the groin and drags him to the airlock. Luckily the airlock did not re-lock itself, so it’s a simple matter to kick Sendak into it. What proves challenging is getting Keith to let go of him. 

Keith swears in every language he knows. Japanese, Korean, English, his high-school French, the fragments of Latin he learned during his Harry Potter phase, a bit of Mandarin and some Ojibwe he somehow still remembers from the time his babysitter dropped a hot pan on her foot while he was in middle-school. Thanks to the mask muffling the majority of Keith’s fury, Sendak has no idea who is attacking him. His first thought would definitely not be the Champion’s punk little brother. 

As his throat is crushed flat and the vision in his natural eye swims, Lotor comes into view, and everything starts to make sense. He does not realise Lotor is trying to separate him from his attacker and lashes out blindly, catching Lotor both off-guard and smack in the face with his super robot arm. The momentum knocks Lotor onto his back and sends him rolling hedgehog-like down the hallway, right into the path of the woman who has come looking for Sendak.   
She goes down like a Miamian encountering a black-iced sidewalk for the first time. It is only through years of training and a natural tendency to stiffen every joint in her body when she trips over that Lallia Qarlyle manages to hang onto the manifesto at all. 

Lallia is nothing if not quick-witted. The instant she realises she has tripped over a Blade (or somebody wearing a Blade uniform), she lets out a wail for Sendak’s benefit “Oh gods! A Blade! I’ve never seen one of those in real life before! A Blade! What will I, a helpless law-abiding subject of Zarkon, do in the face of this Blade?”

She springs off Lotor and presses the manifesto into his hand “Are you Lotor?”

Over her shoulder, Lotor spots a guard tearing towards them. He seizes Lallia and brings his knife up to her throat “I’ll cut her!”

“You’re him.” mumbles Lallia.

The guard freezes. This is also enough to convince Keith it is time to stop trying to feed Kolivan his own face- he leaps off the much bigger Galra and kicks the airlock door shut in his face, then throws his full body-weight against the door until the sealing mechanism clicks into place.

“Where the fuck is the evacuate button…” Keith’s mask is so spattered with blood he has a hard time seeing through it.

“Let’s go!” shouts Lotor.

“First I’m gonna launch his ass into space, then we go!”

Because Lallia cannot break character to tell Keith to knock that shit off, she screams. Like her first effort it is earnest but not very convincing. From what Keith has seen, none of the Qarlyles are talented liars.

“Where is the fucking button?” Keith runs his palms up and down the walls and door, but he can’t find anything to press.

Sendak has recovered enough to start banging on his side of the door. He’s shouting some pretty foul things. Things he plans to do to Keith, specifically to Keith’s head and whatever he uses an anal orifice, as soon as he gets out of there.

“You’d need to put in the skeleton code again-”

Keith rounds on him “Which is?”

Lallia lets out another scream. She has had to assume an awkward stooping position to allow Lotor’s arm around her neck since she is about eight feet tall. If Lotor had really captured her, he would have had to jump to get his knife anywhere near her throat.  
Somewhere in the back of Keith’s brain where his rational mind lives he knows he has thrown a serious mission into terrible jeopardy. All of his experience with triage and quiet sabotage couldn’t do a thing to keep him from losing it the moment he saw Sendak. In a way, he has failed Kolivan. In a much more urgent and realistic way he is about to fail Kolivan very badly by getting his daughter caught in the crossfire of a mission gone wrong- and he can’t do that. Not to Lallia.

Keith takes a deep breath. He butts his head against the porthole and startles Sendak into a brief silence “Don’t you ever come near my brother again.”

Sendak’s face brightens with almost childish wonder “Oh, quiznak me! You’re the goddamned Red Paladin!”

Keith stalks towards Lotor and Lallia.

Sendak lets out a wet, barking laugh “Give him my love! Let him know I think about him every day!”

If it isn’t for the fact that all hell breaks loose an instant after Sendak says that, Keith is pretty sure he would have put his head through the reinforced crystal porthole and bitten the bastard’s throat right out. 

But everything goes to hell. 

Suddenly the guard is not alone. Zethrid has materialised out of nowhere and advances, heedless of Lallia’s scream of warning, with her fists eagerly raised. Behind Lotor, the other two generals have appeared, along with the druid. Everything stinks of ozone. The shortest of the general has a gun trained on Lotor’s back. The other one has got a knife the size of Keith’s forearm. The druid is levitating a whole foot off the fucking ground and Keith is frozen to the spot. 

The rational part of his mind pipes up again. Weirdly, it sounds like Shiro.

You fucked up, Keith thinks in his brother’s voice, Jae-an you fucked up real hard.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So in the show she immediately knows what to call Keith. This either means that Kolivan kicked a door in and went "oh my gods, Krols, you won't believe what your ex called the kid" or it means that Krolia, a strong, determined, grown-ass woman with a brain of her own said 'ok sounds good' when Tex Kogane opened his sinful mouth, pointed at their newborn, and said 'Keith'. I refuse to believe the latter is true.
> 
> (I apologise to everyone named Keith. You're all wonderful people and your name is too)


	15. Lallia Qarlyle

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Things get, impossibly, even more fucked up than they already were.

“Hey Shiro? Can I tell you something weird?”

Hanging over the sink, Shiro pauses. Last time Allura said that Shiro ended up learning a lot more about Altean gonads than he ever planned to- at least from Allura. As it turns out, her dick is bigger than his dick. 

“Are you hesitating?” Allura puts her head around the door with a toothbrush sticking out of her mouth “It’s no problem if you don’t want to get into anything, um, real.”

Oh Lord. She’s using Hunk’s word for ‘emotionally demanding issues’, and whenever Allura paraphrases Hunk that means she’s trying to channel some of his wonderful, sunny energy, which can only mean she’s about to tell Shiro something major. Challenging. Possibly life-changing. Nothing as pedestrian as a problem with the war effort. Allura doesn’t sugar-coat that for him.   
She’ll barge right into his bathroom while he is in mid-shower, mid-note of his shower-song and shout over him screaming for her to get out because military matters are more important than puny human ideas about modest, goddamit. Look, she’ll even take her shirt off too if that will make him feel less insecure about being naked- and then she’ll have the nerve to be offended when Shiro throws his shampoo bottle at her. 

So, yeah, whatever Shiro is about to hear he isn’t sure he wants to hear it after the sort of day he has just had. But because it’s Allura, he says “Nah, it’s fine. What’s up?”

“Are you alright?”

Shiro blinks “Kind of? It’s hard for me to tell this soon after a fight. Nothing’s broken. Ask me again after I’ve had time to sleep.”

Allura gives him a look. The Look, in fact. The patented queenly scowl.

“Oh. You meant emotionally? Spiritually? All of the above?”

Allura budges him away from the sink and spits into the sink, then goes for his hairbrush to whack her hair into a bun. Shiro feels bad every time she has to use that. He really should find a wide-toothed comb for her because Allura has hair more like a black woman’s than she does the tangle-free Asian floof Shiro’s hairbrush is made to deal with.  
“Yes. Emotionally. Spiritually. Chemically.”

Shiro retreats to the edge of the tub with a shrug, watching Allura do battle with her hair. Earlier she stuck her head under the faucet and rinsed the worst of the ro-beast gunk out of it, which has left it damp now, but Allura is far too tired to bother with drying it at the moment. That means she’s going to wake up tomorrow with a frizzy storm-system on her head and will probably have to get Lance or Hunk to help with the clean-up operation. 

“I’m making do.”

Allura sighs “Are you really, though? I’ve noticed you seem a bit different lately.”

“Different how?”

She gestures with the hairbrush “I don’t know. A bit quicker to anger.”

“Oh, sorry. I’m trying to keep a level head, but the kids get right up my butt and there’s a war effort…I don’t know,” Shiro glances down at the alien arm. For whatever reason, his prosthetic has started to glow softly. It does that every now and then. If Shiro knew why he would have stopped it a long time ago. Freaks him out to have his body act like that, apparently independent from him “Humans get this thing called PTSD. It’s a disorder where we go a little nuts because we’ve been through a lot of trauma. It can make you snappy. I’m not sure if I have it or not. I read somewhere that your mind will sometimes wait to, just sort of, uh, collapse, until it knows you’re in a safe space, because of the human survival instinct and all that.”

“That’s quite considerate of it. So you can’t tell?”

“No. Sorry.”

She glowers at her reflection and wrenches the brush through a tangle “Don’t apologise for it. I just wanted to see if there was something I could do for you.” 

Shiro shrugs “It helps to know you’re watching my back.”

“Of course I am. I need you for as long as you can manage.”

“Manage, huh?” Shiro gives his glowing hand a shake and considers gnawing at it- intimidation tactics. Behave, foul hand, because I could nip off all your fingers with the same amount of force I would use to bite through a carrot “I didn’t know I had a timer on me. A time when I would just stop being able to do my job, I mean.”

“Shiro, your job and your responsibilities are two very different things. You have a responsibility to the team because they see you as an authority figure and, more than that, a role model. But your primary job, as I understand human biology, is to take care of yourself. And the sort of things you’ve been through? Of course you’re going to need to stop at some point. You can’t just keep going like this. At some point you’re either going to have to take a break or die, and seeing as I won’t let you die, it’s going to be a break.”

“Sounds like I don’t have a choice in the matter.”

Allura gives him a look somewhere between poisonous and loving “Well unless you find some sort of way to exist without the chemistry of your very mammalian, very traumatised brain affecting you at some point, then you don’t. And if you think you can have your break-down without me noticing then you don’t know me very well at all, do you, Takashi?”

Shiro laughs “I know you well enough not to fight you.”

“Damn straight you do. Willow Almighty, I need a fucking nap so badly. We have got to do something about those ro-beasts.”

Shiro smiles at her “Love you, Princess.”

“Love you too, Paladin.” 

 

The general that shoots Keith in the chest looks so much like Lallia it is kind of ridiculous. Family resemblance has always been a bit of a touchy subject for Keith because he and Shiro barely look like each other. Shiro is Japanese as well as Korean, but people only usually pick up on the Japanese part because it is so conveniently sign-posted in his name. The Korean kid standing next to him must be a friend, right? Or the kid he’s baby-sitting? For most people it stands to reason that a kid popularly known as Shiro is going to have a brother with a name that is equally Japanese- an Akira, a Ryou, a Shinji. 

“Don’t worry,” Shiro told him on the first day at the Garrison, when Iverson had asked in passing how long Shiro and Keith had known each other “We look alike on the inside. Abandonment issues and self-flagellating emotional repression all the way down.”

So Keith’s initial reaction to being shot by Lallia’s mother is not agony, because goddamn does it hurt to be clipped by laser-fire even when he’s in his armour, but jealousy. At least Lallia looks like her family. 

It occurs to Keith, as the Ribbon-headed general lunges past Lotor and Lallia, her claws outstretched for his neck, that if she beats him badly enough the healing pod might have to entirely reconstruct his face. Maybe he can get Hunk to programme it to just super-impose Shiro’s face over the ruins of his old one. If Keith had his brother’s face then all of his worries about passing would go right out the window.  
The smallest of the generals lands on his chest. She evidently intended to break his ribs with that blow, but missed, and instead ends up jabbing him in the chest. With the sensation that one of his boobs has just inverted, Keith lets out a surprisingly powerful yell for someone who has been floored by a laser and kneed in the chest in the same two seconds, and upper-cuts the general in the face. Her jawbone buckles against the heel of his palm. 

He becomes faintly aware that Sendak is shouting for the general to open the airlock, which makes Keith madder. He swings his legs up and locks the ankles around the general’s neck. From the look on her face this is the first time she has ever been ankle-suplexed; if she had, she would know to be afraid. 

Keith slams her ribbony head into the ground as hard as he can. She grunts. She wriggles in a way that suggests she wants to strangle him with her knees, so Keith bangs her head into the ground a couple more times.

Meanwhile Lotor has got Lallia’s mother (Axle? Arka? Something with an A) and the huge general, presumably the one with the harem, held off at arm’s length.

“I’ll shoot her.” he says it with such conviction- eagerness, almost, that Keith is kind of worried he might.

“Quiznak,” says Lallia’s mother “Lotor, is that you?”

The druid lets out a squawk of surprise. 

“It’s barely been two movements!” shouts the harem general “Are you quiznakking me? It takes you two movements to utterly betray everything the empire stands for?”

“You know what? Quiznak you both! You too, Ezor,” he addresses the general suffocating in Keith’s grip “You were going to give me up to my bastard father! He’d have killed me, you know that?”

“You shot Narti in the face!”

“Narti didn’t have a face! She had mandibles and a cranium! And besides, she was a spy!”

“We don’t know if she was willingly a spy!” snaps Lallia’s mother, whose name Keith has just remembered. Acxa. 

“So? She was still a threat to us!”

“The quiznak she was! You were just worried your selfish ass might get shot!” bellows the harem general “Druid, fry him!”

Acxa throws her arm out in front of the druid “No! He’s got my daughter! What the quiznak, Zethrid?”

Lallia’s got this look in her eye that reminds Keith, with a pang of homesickness, of Hunk, and the dead-eyed longing to be elsewhere that comes over his face when people argue over his head. 

Ezor lets out a croak for help.

At last, the others remember she is, in fact, being strangled.

Acxa turns the gun on Keith “Get off of her!”

Keith glances between Acxa and Lotor. He nods. Keith lets Ezor goes. With a gasp, she slithers away from him and falls prone at Acxa’s feet.

“Out of the way, Zethrid,” Lotor presses the knife against Lallia’s neck a little harder, putting Keith’s teeth on edge.

Sendak is head-butting the porthole by now in his eagerness to get out “OPEN! THE! AIRLOCK!”

Zethrid scoots out of the way with a snarl on her face, and picks Ezor up by the elbow “You’re not gonna get away from us.”

Lotor motions for Keith to go ahead of him and starts to back down the hall, facing his generals “Zethrid, I flew into the surface of a sun to avoid my father’s clammy grasp. If you think you’ve got me pinned just because I’m on a ship full of people who are under orders to kill me then you don’t know me very well. Do you?”

“Let go of my daughter!” barks Acxa. Keith feels the order almost like a physical blow.

But Lotor merely flashes a grin over Lallia’s broad shoulder “She’s my daughter now.”

The literal second Lotor has gotten around the corner there is a bellow of “DRUID! GET HIM!” from Zethrid. 

Lotor lets go of Lallia and gives her a gentle push to get her moving down the next hall “Thank you ever so much for the help.”

 

“Oh, no problem,” she says brightly and takes Keith’s hand “Thanks for not actually cutting me. Lot of people don’t know how to fake a hostage situation properly. They get excited and think they need to, like, shed some blood to make it convincing, when all you really need is to bug your eyes out to look nuts. Are you alright, K?”

Keith lets out a wheeze to the affirmative. 

Then suddenly the hallway is clogged up with guards. They have come spilling out of what Keith takes to be the armoury, since they’re all strapping on guns and pushing laser-clips into place. One of them notices the two Blades and presumed hostage are charging them and lets out a wordless hoot of alarm. The muzzle of a gun rears up and takes aim for them.

“Down!” Lotor flattens Keith to the ground and takes Lallia with them. 

An instant later a beam of crackling blue energy grazes their backs and crashes into the bunch of guards.

Keith hears a young voice at the end of the hall shout “Aw, quiznak me!”

The druid raises their hand for a second attempt. The hood has fallen back, and Keith realises with a sickening twist that this druid is about the same age as Pidge. Even so, he turns onto his back (headbutting Lotor in the chin in the process) and throws his knife. His aim is impeccable. The knife thumps home in the druid’s chest.   
They let out a wet mumble of surprise. Keith makes a fist and activates a magnet in his glove, the twin of a magnet in the hilt of his knife which summons it back from the druid’s chest. Blue blood sprays from their chest- oh, God, Keith hit an artery. 

Shoving Lotor away, Keith runs to the druid’s side and manages to catch them just before they hit the ground. Keith rips the hem of their robe and presses the fabric in a ball over the wound. The kid screams.   
“Hold it!” he barks.

He clasps the druid’s shaking hand and presses it over the fabric in the place of his own. They stare at him with wide, frightened eyes.

“Keep pressure on that. You’re gonna be fine.”

They open their mouth, perhaps to protest or to spit an incantation in their face, but a string of blood drips over their lower lip instead. 

“Come on!” roars Lotor.

Keith swears and sprints to catch up with him and Lallia, jumping over the smoking heap of guards. Is it his imagination or did that kid kind of look like Pidge too?

“What was that?” hisses Lotor over his shoulder.

“They’re just a baby!”

“A murderous baby!”

Lallia stops their argument by punting Keith to the side with her hip. She knocks him into a tighter corridor and takes the lead, holding him by the hand again. For some reason it reminds Keith of running to catch the bus with Shiro. Most often Shiro would just tuck him under one arm and do the running for both of them because Keith’s legs were too short to keep pace with him.   
Lotor is bringing up the rear and doing a remarkable job of deflecting the laser-fire. He grabbed a shield off of one of the guards the druid knocked out for them and is fending off the majority of the fire. He must have caught one of the lasers full in the face, however, because his the mask of his uniform has glitched out. 

“Where are we going?” shouts Keith.

“There’s a shuttle bay! Take one of ours and grab one of yours on the way out!”

The hall darkens; the path is stopped up by soldiers again. 

One of them calls out “Get down, Lallia!”

Lallia grimaces “I can’t!” and lowers her shoulder and breaks the blockade apart without losing her grip on Keith for an instant. 

To his horror they have come out into an open area- a kind of main hall, he thinks, and its full of confused Galra dressed as soldiers and crew alike. Seems that Keith and his accomplices have interrupted the crew in mid-emergency response. Half of the people are just putting on rifles or loading clips into their weapons, while the rest have the harried, terrified expressions that is nearly universal when people are hauling ass towards the nearest shelter. 

Keith spots another druid in the crowd- wait, no, that’s not a druid.

“MONGREL TRAITOR!” bellows Haggar. 

The crowd parts before her. Snarling, she lifts her hands and Keith, being the stupid nerd he is, mutters “Kamehameha.” as he takes cover. 

The equivalent of a small sun comes out of her palms. Once again Keith face-plants to safety and feels the scrape of a huge amount of energy surging above his spine. The heat feels like it is burning his eyelashes even under his mask as he peers underneath the protective arm Lallia tossed over him, and sees Lotor turtling up behind the shield. But at the same time, he advances.  
Rivulets of metal stream from the shield as it melts in his hands. Lotor starts to run towards Haggar. He leaps over his prone accomplices and in a few more swift steps is just in front of the witch. Haggar’s flame finally stops. Whether it’s because she has exhausted her energy or because she would have been burned instead Keith can’t tell- Keith doesn’t care, either, because what Lotor does next might be the best thing he has ever seen.

Lotor raises the half-melted shield and, while dozens of imperial crew and soldiers watch on in silent horror, smacks Haggar in the face. Melted metal sprays into the air. A couple of drops land on Keith’s back and neck, and Lallia cries out, swatting a droplet off of the back of her hand. 

Haggar crumples. Just to make sure she’s going to stay down, Lotor brings the shield down on her head twice more. On the second blow a third of the shield snaps off and skitters across the floor like a piece of butter in a frying pan. 

He flings the remains of the shield to the ground “Anyone else?”

One younger man flings his gun to the ground. A couple more follow his example as Keith and Lallia tentatively get to their feet, but the majority of them hang onto their weapons, pressing themselves against the walls and windows. Lotor helps Keith stand.

“Um,” Keith lamely puts his knife to Lallia’s throat “Hostage. Still got one. Which way to the shuttle bay?”

The man who tossed his gun down points to the right, then gets face-down on the ground and folds his hands behind his head.   
This time, running takes some serious effort on Keith’s part. Ezor injured him worse than he initially thought, going by the stabbing pain in his chest. Lallia notices the hitch in his breathing and wraps an arm around his waist. Keith is too grateful for the support to point out that she just destroyed the illusion of hostage-taking. Oh well. They can deal with that later.

Thankfully the shuttle bay is only one room over, and there are only two guards milling around the room. The woman of the two lifts her gun tentatively, but her partner immediately rips off their rifle and hands it over to Lotor, barrel-first.

“If the empire wants me to keep Prince Lotor from stealing shuttles,” says the second guard testily “They should at least cover the dental insurance I’m going to need when he pulps my face.”

Lotor accepts the gun with a grateful smile. 

Some of the crew have gathered up in the doorway. Not out of any compulsion to stop Lotor or preserve the dignity and honour of the empire, of course, but out of curiosity to see what will happen next. The first guard quickly grasps the situation and drops her weapon too, sprinting after her friend with a thin mewl of protest.   
Meanwhile, Keith has gotten to the point where he is having trouble staying on his own two feet. The pain in his chest has trebled from the first pang he felt only a couple of seconds ago. He should have known better- he should have gotten out of Ezor’s way, but he was too hopped up on adrenalin and anger from seeing Sendak- the injury, from the first day on Chornea, it might still be affecting him. 

As Lotor pops the shuttle door open and climbs into the driver’s seat, Keith tries to follow him. He cannot move. He understands that if he so much as inches forwards he is going to fall over. 

Lallia takes his arm “Can you walk?”

He shakes his head, his jaw tense.

“WHERE THE QUIZNAK IS HE?” bellows Zethrid in the near-distance.

The guards scatter from the door like a flock of frightened birds and reveal Zethrid, at the far end of the main hall, and approaching at approximately the speed of light. Keith has never seen such a look of pure, unadulterated bloodlust before. Lallia swears, scoops him up bridal-style and pushes him into the shotgun seat.

Keith cries out in pain.

“Get him out of here!” orders Lallia.

“And you?”

She glances over her shoulder at the charging Zethrid “I can’t leave Mom!”

That’s good enough for Lotor. Before Keith can protest, the shuttle door has closed on Lallia. Panic overwhelms the pain just enough so that Keith can sit up, slapping a hand against the window.  
“Wait, we can’t leave her-” he stops, feeling blood spill over his lip and pool at the bottom of his mask.

Lallia smiles and presses her hand to the glass as well. She says something. He can’t hear what it is over Zethrid’s outraged scream.

The shuttle hums to life. 

“Lallia!” 

She forms the words again, then darts away to a control panel on the wall. The bay’s doors swing open with a klaxon blast. Zethrid appears at the window and manages to drive her elbow against the glass once before Lotor pulls the shuttle from its moorings, and revs the engines to carry them out of there with such force that Keith is thrown back into his seat. He actually hears a bone move inside of him.   
Keith blacks out with Lallia’s name on his bloody lips. 

 

Acxa got there just after Haggar got finished killing one of her druids. Haggar does not have the best handle on her temper even when there is little to anger over. So when something goes as badly wrong as having the Prince essentially waltz out of a heavily guarded ship with the only complete copy of her experiment manifesto, of course Haggar is going to react badly. Her face is lightly swollen and is twice-splashed with blood. The first layer is her own. The second has come from the druid, who is scattered in several pieces across the room.  
Haggar at least had the decency to pull them to the side to kill them. The rest of the ship needs time to gather its wits, to process the ludicrousness of the heist that they, fully trained soldiers and bodyguards and brawlers and some of Sendak’s most prized fighters, were all too cowed to stop because it was so surprising, and because Lotor made such an impression when he banged Haggar in the face with a half-melted shield no one could summon the courage to stop him. 

Understandable. 

Lotor is terrifying when he is fighting for his life. It was one of the reasons Acxa decided she would give him her full support and total loyalty when they first met; even as a teenager disorientated from a stay in a healing pod that was so long it should have been terminal, he had fire. 

Coloured like a corpse, but he had this lively, irrepressible air of determination about him that made Acxa like him immediately and wish for her far-flung little sister. It takes something special in a person to make Acxa miss the sister she has never properly known. Something worth defending.

Then Lotor went and threw it away. Acxa was not sure when she began this mission if she really wanted to hurt Lotor again. The look on his face the time she shot him- remembering it is so bad even now that Acxa has to pause for a second, press a hand over her churning stomach and breathe deeply. She thought hurting Lotor again might kill her.  
But now, thanks to Lotor, her youngest daughter has been locked up in the brig. 

Haggar stands at the epicentre of the blossom of blood and guts. She pants heavily, clutching a hand to her chest. Sendak has gathered himself up in the corner like an awkward teenager who has just seen his parents have a fight. His front is completely soaked with blood. Half of it is actually his- the tiny Blade apparently tried to peel his face off with their bare claws. At the moment it seems his face is being held together by some hastily applied bandages and sticking plasters and the power of positive thought. 

Acxa clears her throat.

Noticing her at last, Haggar flicks a length of gristle from the shoulder of her robe. The look on her face is pure malice.  
“General Qarlyle.” She shuffles towards Acxa with her mouth hanging open in the manner of an over-heated Yupper “My druid, Cordag, he was young. Not as young as the other one, mind you, but young enough that I worried he might fail me. I couldn’t afford to take any of my more experienced druids. They’re all attending to our emperor now, long may his reign be. Cordag got scared. I can understand that. This was his first time seeing action. But you, General, what is your excuse? How does one become a General when one is so laughably ineffective in a crisis?”

Acxa imagines smashing her knee into the old bitch’s face. Then she thinks of Lallia, stuck in magna-cuffs in the ship’s brig, and says “It won’t happen again, Lord Haggar. Please make me aware of anything I can do to rectify the situation.”

Haggar rolls her pale yellow eyes. It’s been a while since Acxa had to be this close to her, and she finds herself wondering if Haggar’s eyes have always looked so much like Lotor’s.   
“You and your kin have brought about a disaster. Your sister generals are almost as bad. If this is the best the gods can give me to preserve our empire, then it might be better that we expire altogether.”

Sendak pipes up from the corner “I wouldn’t go that far, Lord Haggar. We can turn this around! We still have half of the manifesto. There’s plenty of damage that can be done with that.”

Suddenly Haggar clutches her forehead as if she has a splitting migraine “Oh, shut your fawning trap, Sendak, your voice is like a spork to the ear-flute.”

“Are you alright? Have you perhaps strained yourself-”

“I’m serious, Sendak. One more word from your miserable tongue and it will be fed to the robeasts.”

Sendak’s jaw snaps shut.

“Gods-damned Kuron,” mutters Haggar. Whatever in the Inferno just happened to her head has made her forget completely about Acxa.   
She kicks half an arm out of her way with a vicious curse and moves like a drunk, grasping the door-frame for support on her way out. The dragging hem of her robe leaves a trail of blood after her.

Sendak glowers at Acxa “Well, you’ve made a fine mess of this.”

Acxa folds her arms “You were the first to encounter the intruders. If you hadn’t gotten yourself shoved into an airlock we might have avoided all of this.”

He bristles and tries to rush her, maybe to grab her collar, but nearly wipes out on a piece of lung. Sendak grabs the edge of a table “Oh quiznak off, Acxa! The tiny bastard nearly ripped my one damn eye out! You should be sympathetic.”

Willow Almighty, how did Ezor ever become friends with this bastard?  
“I find it hard to be sympathetic when you try to blame the whole fiasco on me and my daughter.”

“Your daughter ran with them!”

“She was dragged! The tiny Blade had her hand-”

Sendak slams his massive fist on the table, sending a crack through the surface “Gods-dammit, Acxa! I have thirty different people telling me they saw your child actively helping those Blades! Staying with them when she had a chance to get away! Putting one of them on the shuttle they stole! She was holding the tiny Blade’s hand, not the other way around!”

Inwardly, Acxa curses her ex-husband for his political affiliations. If he wasn’t balls-deep in Blade activity, she wouldn’t be having to extricate Lallia from this mess.   
Acxa shakes her head “Your witnesses are wrong. Or they were tricked. It’s just like a Blade to make us turn on each other.”

With a growl, Sendak gets very close to her, giving her a better view of his facial wounds than she wanted “Acxa. Acxa. You’re a smart woman. You’re a good general. You love your emperor, long may his reign be. We have just had a hell of a situation on this ship and it is our duty, as loyal servants of Zarkon, and say it with me- long may his reign be!”

Acxa echoes him reluctantly.

“Our duty, Acxa, is to clean this mess up as quick as we can to make his job manageable. Your daughter is a turn-fur. She colluded with the Blades in full view of thirty soldiers and guards and quiznakking Haggar. We have footage of her actively defending the tiny Blade and your former boss. Now, what do you want to do about that? Do you want to do the honest thing?”

“I can’t just-”

“Or,” Sendak’s forehead is grazing Acxa’s now “Are you asking me to go to Haggar and tell her the footage, the witnesses and her own experience are all wrong? Do you want me to use up the very last of my good graces with Haggar to pull your daughter’s traitorous ass out of this fire? Because that, Acxa, that means you’re prioritising your family over your true family, the empire. And I can’t forgive that kind of insubordination.”

A long, tense moment passes. Acxa stares at Sendak. Sendak stares back at her. Blood drips from the ceiling onto her scalp and falls, warm and wet, down the back of her neck. 

At last, Acxa blinks. She draws a deep breath and steps back “Punish her, then. Arrest her. Court-martial her. If she can’t be trusted then just get her out of the way. I’ll make sure she can’t do anything to hurt the empire again.”

“No, I will. You’ve just proven your ability to think rationally is compromised when your family is involved.”

Cold fear seizes Acxa’s stomach. One of her hearts skips a beat.

Sendak sees that she has grasped his meaning, and smiles “You know the punishment for treason.”

“No.”

He nods “Our administration is a hotbed of corruption, Acxa, and I consider it my duty to encourage equality wherever I can, especially where matters of nepotism are considered. Your daughter is subject to the same laws against treason as any other imperial soldier.”

“You can’t!”

Attracted by all of the shouting, Ezor puts her head around the door “Everything alright in here?”  
One look at Acxa’s face tells her otherwise. 

She wraps her arms around Acxa’s shaking shoulders and looks to Sendak in askance.

Sendak digs a communicator out of his pocket and, with a poisonous grin, says loudly “Bridge, notify New Daibazaal. We will be sending them a prisoner within the hour. A new gladiator for the rings.”

Ezor gasps “Oh!”

“Don’t worry. I won’t send her away before you have a chance to say goodbye.” Sendak is about to pat Acxa on the shoulder,but thinks the better of it. He makes a smug retreat, kicking at the same arm that enraged Haggar on his way out. 

Acxa pushes her face into Ezor’s shoulder with a sob. Hushing her, Ezor sits her down on the edge of the cracked table. Ezor sniffs as well. She mops up Acxa’s bruised cheek with her sleeve and kisses her friend on the forehead. Acxa leans into her.

“Oh, Acxa, I know. I know. I’m so sorry. But it’s only fair.”

Acxa stiffens. She pulls away from Ezor.

“What?” Ezor wipes her own eyes “I’m sure Lallia will be fine! If she can make it through the first couple of movements then I’m sure Sendak will let you go see her. What he said about nepotism- he’s just mad. Look, we don’t actually know that she was colluding with the Blades, do we? The evidence is – I mean, it’s, uh, it’s evidence, alright. But people have gotten out of the rings after doing worse stuff. Zethrid and I will help you. We’ll figure this out.”

Acxa stands up. Her tears are still flowing freely “Figure this out?”

Ezor nods “I promise. Me and Zethrid will stick by you. You’re our sister.”

“I’m a mother, Ezor, whose child is about to be taken into the worst cesspit on New Daibazaal! She’s going to be killed within the movement!”

“Lallia is a strong girl. She’ll make it!”

Shaking her head, Acxa puts her back to Ezor. Her hands curl into fists.

“Look,” Ezor sighs “I know this is scary. Just lay down for a little while. You’ll feel better after you get some sleep. Then we can start working this out.”

Acxa lets out a long breath. Her shoulders slump with resignation. 

“It’s gonna be ok, Acxa. Everything will work out.”

“Yes. I’m sure it will.” and she goes without a backwards glance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When I started this fanfiction I didn't intend to, as certain parts of tumblr say, 'whump' Keith so damned hard. But that boy just keeps getting in the way of things. Wonder what Lotor is gonna do to help? If Lotor wants to help at all, I mean. And poor Acxa, with her daughter on the way to the gladiator rings in the capital of the empire. That really sucks. Is there some kind of therapy group for that?
> 
> On a lighter note, I should just mention that Shiro knows that Allura has him beat in the size department not because of any sexual situation- just because when two people who are penis-equipped become close friends in close quarters, it is only a matter of time before they're comparing endowments. But hey if you wanna read it as Shallura then go on ahead- romantic Shallura is just as valid as queerplatonic Shallura.


	16. Double-berth healing pod

The day after the second surgery is successfully completed, Lotor goes missing. The IV hovers abandoned next to his bed. The machines monitoring his vitals has been quietly switched off so that the sudden stoppage of all of his vitals at once, when he stripped away the sensors and pulled out the needles, would not alert the nurses. His cane and coat have been taken from the closet, but he is going barefoot, which means he probably didn’t intend to leave the hospital grounds.

Lotor went missing just before Zarkon was due to visit.

Reliable as a comet, Zarkon arranges entire days of diplomacy and law-keeping and zooming around in the Black Lion so that he has at least a free varga to spend with his son. This is all fine with Lotor. He like seeing his father. Luckily, they get on like a Weblum on fire, and are perfectly happy to see each other even if the only thing Lotor has the strength for is a bit of light conversation from his hospital pillow.

What chased Lotor from his room this time was learning that his mother would be coming with Zarkon today.  
Technically, that is Coran’s fault. Zarkon asked that Lotor not be told his mother was coming for fear that he might do something exactly like this if he had time to think about just how much he did not want to see her. But Coran didn’t like the idea of suddenly springing Honerva on her poor son out of nowhere- he is of the opinion that Lotor should have an active role in deciding what happens to him. This is all well and good for matters of medicine and travel, say, if Lotor wants to argue that he should spend the coming winter on Altea instead of Daibazaal, but in issues of such emotional weight, the adults in Lotor’s life prefer to keep him out of the loop until there’s nothing he can do about it.

It is only the urgency of finding the sick prince that has prevented Coran from melting into a quivering puddle of guilt on the floor. He’s doing laps of the hospital at top speed, calling for Lotor in the authoritative bass bellow he uses on Allura when she’s deep in the shit. Meanwhile Zarkon has taken the basement levels of the hospital. How he thinks Lotor can get down those stairs with his recent surgery, Allura doesn’t know, but she can hear him opening cupboards and shouting into them for his son. Along with a handful of orderlies Allura has the task of searching the immediate grounds of the hospital.   
He wasn’t in the garden or the aromatherapy block or the physio amphitheatre. He wasn’t at the pond. He wasn’t hanging about near the kennels where the assistance Yuppers are trained, where he likes to go and put his hands through the fence to be licked and nuzzled. 

At this point Allura has decided she is looking for a body. That’s it. Lotor is dead. Lotor has been kidnapped, the kidnapping has been botched and his little dead body lies in wait somewhere. This only makes her run faster; she must get to the body before the carrion animals get to him. He has to be on the grounds somewhere.   
He wasn’t in the grove where the medicine is grown. He wasn’t near the gates. He wasn’t near the hospital crematorium, which he has threatened to throw himself into more than once. In jest, of course. He wouldn’t actually do that. Hopefully.

And now, knowing for sure that Lotor is either a lump of barbecuing flesh or already ashes in the furnace, Allura is running towards the little building at the very back of the complex. A thin plume of smoke rises from the triangular chimney mounted on the building’s brow. Allura holds her breath. No matter what, she is determined not to inhale any of her little brother.   
As she is not thinking logically, Allura forgets that she needs to breathe- always, but especially when doing something physically strenuous like running towards the crematorium in the vain hope of shutting off the furnace before it purges all traces of Lotor from existence. She quickly becomes light-headed. Allura realises her mistake. She throws herself about the trunk of a tree to keep from falling on her face and heaves. 

A voice calls down to her, seemingly from the heavens “I suppose the game is up, then.”

There, in the fork of two wide boughs, is the unmistakable white smudge of Lotor’s hair. The green shadows have done a good job of camouflaging him and his dark clothes. There would be no way to distinguish him from the shadows all around him except his hair. She can just make him out reclining on the branches with the book of verse he had on the table this morning and his cane across his lap.

Allura thumps her fist on the trunk “You horrid little nerd!”  
She would be crying with relief if she weren’t so damn mad at him. 

Slowly, Lotor closes the book and peers down at her “Horrid? Oh, mind out, sis. You shouldn’t use such rough language in front of the baby.”

“You little shit,” Allura finds a foothold in the trunk and begins to shimmy up “You gave us all a panic attack! Coran is beside himself and Zarkon thought you might have even been kidnapped! I thought you were dead!”

Lotor blinks “Me? The gods of death don’t want me in their realm anymore than those of life do. Why do you think I’m stuck here?” he slips the book into a deep pocket “Passing back and forth in an interminable game of hot-space-potato where my soul is the space-potato. I should have expired the moment I was lifted from the bloody woman’s body, like a tumour-”

“Stop talking like that! By Willow, did you eat some of that poetry you were reading?”

He draws an elbow across his eyes “Speak softly to me, sister, that I might find some favour in the voice I so love.”

“Your butt’s gonna find favour from my foot in a minute.”

He shuffles over carefully to make room for her on the branch. Lowering his elbow, he narrows his eyes at her “Are you really going to make me go talk to her?”

“Yes.” Allura coughs and smacks her chest “Look, I can’t let you stay up in this tree the whole evening. Your father is beside himself. Coran is beyond being beside himself. Coran has lost his shit and lost whatever you lose after your shit is gone.”

His head lolls back. With his throat exposed, Allura can clearly see the thin red line where his flesh was just recently opened. This surgery involved reinforcing a couple of vital tissues. Lotor’s always had problems with his major veins and arteries. His double-jugular was one of the targets of the most recent surgery. Even from just a cursory glance, Allura can tell the vein is much stronger. Before he got the graft it looked like he had a piece of purple grass in his neck. Quintessence is a stubborn beast- it will try to make a viable body for even the most sickly of hosts.   
Now, at least, the double-jugular is firm and fat against his skin, appearing more like a vein and less like a straw one of the medical students accidentally left in him. 

Lotor sighs. The red line moves up and down his throat. Allura bites her bottom lip, imagining how she will hold his throat together should it open again.  
“I didn’t mean to upset Coran. Or Father. I just didn’t want to upset myself either, you know? I don’t see why I should be obliged to expose myself to that woman and her slap-shod attempts at pretending she actually cares what happens to me. I’m an embarrassment to her, you know. I should have been a crowning achievement. The pinnacle of craftmanship. She didn’t even have to think about designing me- all she had to do was sit about for ten months and let me brew up in there, but she fucked that up, she stood too close to the Rift and made me sick, and now she’s reminded of her greatest lab-mishap every time she looks at me. I know it. She knows it. Everyone else knows it. It’s not sparing my feelings to pretend otherwise. I’d rather just acknowledge that she hates the sight of me and be done with it so I can get on with my queasy little life.”

It hurts Allura’s hearts to hear him talk like that. Not about Honerva. Allura’s feelings about Honerva remain complicated. But it will never not hurt her when Lotor speaks of himself as something which should have been thrown out into the biohazard waste-bins behind Honerva’s labs.   
With a grunt, Allura puts her back to Lotor and gestures for him to climb on “I think you’re her best piece of work.”

Lotor scoffs and wraps his arms around her shoulders. He has some difficulty putting his legs about her waist, though, given the heavy limp in his left leg. She helps him with that.  
“I’m not going to believe that from someone as hopelessly biased as you.”

“What? Voltron is all well and good, but it’s absolutely useless unless it’s all together and everybody is working together.”

Allura starts down the tree trunk. Lotor whacks the tree-branch with his cane as she goes, causing a shower of splinters “I suppose Voltron the robotic soldier is useless unless her team is working in tandem. But even when she isn’t formed, her cats are useful. Ice guns and flame-throwers and all that fun stuff.”

“I’m not talking about the lions. I’m talking about Voltron. Conquering queen of the universe. Say, if my father is feeling a bit pissed off at your father and those feelings are heightened by the rage of battle, Voltron could suddenly lose one of her arms. She’d fall apart at the seams. Lotor, I’ve seen you lose use of almost every one of your limbs at some point in your short and busy life, and never once have you dissolved into a bunch of cats as a result. I’d say you’re doing better than Voltron.”

Lotor laughs in her ear and knocks his forehead against the back of her neck “Well when you put it like that!”

“I’d rather have you by my side in a fight than Voltron, any day.”

“I suppose I’ll just whack our enemies about with my cane?”

“And your poetry book.”

Lotor is still smiling even when she delivers him to the hospital lobby, where an impatient Honerva and a relieved Zarkon wait to receive him. 

 

(About 10,000 years later)

Shiro drops in mid-sentence. One moment he’s watching the little blips of light that represent Matt, Pidge and Hunk on the planet below. The next, the weight of his hand is gone from Allura’s shoulder and he is on the floor. He has covered his face with his hands as calmly as if shielding his eyes from a bright light. It takes a moment for Allura to realise what has happened. Shiro doesn’t make much of a sound when he falls; Pidge’s reedy teenager squeak drowns him out.

“…kills me, don’t put ‘died trying to remote-defuse a magic dirt bomb’. Say Bigfoot killed me.”

Allura scratches at the place where Shiro’s hand was a second ago “What is a Bigfoot?’

“Ask Lance. He dated a guy that looked like a fucking Bigfoot one time-” Hunk is saying, then Coran cuts across him.

Coran has only just managed to catch up with the team. He moves slow of late, which Allura blames on the emotional turmoil Lotor’s reappearance has caused within him. Outwardly there are no signs he is disturbed at all. But this is the man who raised Allura- his heart might as well be pinned to his sleeve for her, including the back-up heart. 

“Are you alright Shiro?”

Allura and Lance turn around quickly. Shiro is on the ground, curled up into a tight ball.

“What?” says Matt through the coms “What’s going on?”

Blood trickles between Shiro’s cupped fingers. Kneeling beside him, Allura tries to pry his fingers apart “Let me look.”

He doesn’t seem to hear her.

“Shiro!”

“What? Is Shiro ok? Is it his arm? Is it a stroke?” Pidge sounds panicked. 

Lance, on the other hand, is deadly calm “We don’t know. Just keep doing what you’re doing, it should be fine.” to Allura “Ok, I’m gonna try to put him in recovery position. Help me out. Put him on his side- there you go. Now bend his legs. Ok, if he’s not gonna open his hands then we need to put something else under his face. It’ll stop him from choking- Pidge, quiet down! I’m gonna make Matt put you in recovery position if you don’t stop yelling.”

There’s nothing immediately on hand to put under Shiro’s face. Lance’s jacket went missing some time during the last week otherwise they’d just shove that under him. In the end, the sight of the blood pooling under Shiro’s chin is too much for Allura and she rips her own shirt off. Thank the gods she’s not wearing her dress today.

Lance chokes; he’s weird about boobs. He thinks it’s especially weird that boob-equipped Alteans just wear a strip of black binding tape over their chests and somehow don’t crush their ribcages, but thank the gods, he is too focussed on helping Shiro to complain about Allura ‘taking the girls out’. The moment the shirt has been put under his face, Shiro’s hands go slack. His eyes are open but his eyes are obviously not seeing. 

Blood drizzles from the corner of his mouth.

Lance leans down so that he is almost laying beside Shiro “Shiro? I want you to blink if you can hear me.”

Shiro replies instead “Risk detected. Elimination proceeding.”

It is definitely not his voice. Allura has spent almost half of her waking hours with Shiro in one way or the other. She knows how he speaks, laughs, sneezes, sings. She could identify him from the rest of the Paladins just by hearing him sigh.  
And that voice coming out of Shiro’s throat is using his vocal chords, sure, but it is the furthest thing from Shiro’s voice she has ever heard.

Lance has enough time to get out the first bit of presumably “What the quiznak does that mean.”, but he is cut off at “What the-” as Shiro’s mechanical arm wraps around his throat. 

Suddenly Shiro is on his feet. He picks Lance up by the throat and throws him the entire length of the room. Allura lets out a cry of protest. She tries to drop Shiro with a kick to the solar plexus, but he catches her foot and then the world is upside-down. He tosses her into the communicator panel so hard she rolls right over the top of it. Head over ankles.   
Allura lands hard on her back. Coughing, she struggles to her feet but Coran has already gotten ahold of Shiro and put him into the same headlock he has seen Shiro use to separate Lance and Pidge on the odd occasion they have a slap-up. Shiro is young and strong. But Coran is old and angry. He forces Shiro to a knee in a second and is aiming to have him on the ground entirely when Shiro suddenly comes to his senses.

Literally, Allura can see the light rush back into his dull eyes. He gasps as if swallowing his own voice again. Blood spills over his lip.

Just from the way he cries out Coran knows the situation has changed. Quickly he lets go of Shiro and spins him around, peering into his face.

“You back with us, lad?”

Shiro coughs and massages his own throat “Where did I go? I was here- I was just here, and it was like someone hit me in the face with a bat. Oh, Jesus. Is my nose broken?”

In spite of Lance’s warning Pidge has been screaming this entire time. Her shrill screams pierces the confusion and activates Shiro’s protective instincts. He starts to look around the room as if he has forgotten she is not actually in the castle. Then he claps eyes on Allura, leaning on the communications panel and gasping for her breath back.

“What happened?”

“You happened!” Lance sits up with a groan “What in the fuck was that! Estuviste perdiendo la cabeza!”

“-off of me! I gotta go back! Shiro’s dying!” 

Allura coughs into the microphone “Everything’s fine, Pidge. It just went weird for a moment.”

“What?” she’s screeching.

“Contact!” yells Hunk in the background.  
He seems to have missed the ruckus on the bridge entirely. Pidge screeching at the top of her lungs isn’t an unusual thing- especially not when Matt is about to tease and needle her to a breaking point. 

The sound that follows Hunk’s warning is an attempt at an explosion. It is the sound of a massive weapon trying its best to fulfil the purpose for which it was engineered and failing miserably. A hiss of compressed air far in the distance, like a geyser. A sort of wet flapping. The dull thud of a heavy object falling off a table. It echoes for a long time across what sounds like a flat plain- the Paladins did pick an area as remote as could be managed on that particular planet. When the last thunderclap has faded out, Hunk and Matt are coughing. Pidge is audibly straining.

It sounds as if Matt might be sitting on her.

“Let- me- go-you-fuck.”

“Chrissakes Katie I can’t!”

“Hunk!” Lance appears at Allura’s elbow “Did it work?”

“Yeah, I think so. I mean we didn’t explode.”

“Great, get up here. As soon as you can. Shiro’s a little sick.”

Pidge swears “Why did you let me think he had a fucking stroke?”

“I didn’t! You assumed-” Lance breaks off with a wince and clutches his side.

Noticing, Shiro spits some blood on the ground “Shit. I hurt you, didn’t I?”

“It wasn’t you. I know who you are. That wasn’t you at all.”

He looks grateful, Allura thinks. But mostly he looks like he is in the middle of the worst pain of his life. He puts a hand on his temple “I was shot, wasn’t I? It’s ok. I’m not gonna freak out. Just tell me.”

“Shot?”

“Shot in the head.” says Shiro with absolute conviction “I can feel it. I’m bleeding. Just put me in the healing pod.”

“Nobody shot you, Shiro. You fell over all of a sudden, then you freaked out on us.”

“Then why the hell am I bleeding?”

Pidge has become a little bit hysterical. She is laughing now, though Allura cannot tell if it is from relief or because she is trying to stop herself from screaming “It’s called a period, honey. All you need is some chocolate and tampons.”

“We’re coming back.” says Hunk “I’m gonna turn off the coms until we get up there ‘cos I think Pidge is losing her mind- call me if you need me.”

“Call me, beep me, if you wanna reach me.” adds Pidge.

With that, they are gone. Allura picks up her shirt again and begins to mop the blood off Shiro’s face. At first he tries to shoo her away, but she won’t hear of it. 

“Why is your shirt off in the first place?” he asks.

“Just letting the girls out for some fresh air.” she grins at Lance. 

Shiro isn’t in the mood for laughing “Something is wrong with me. It feels like there’s a hole open in my head. And it doesn’t even hurt.”

She wipes a string of blood from his earlobe “There isn’t. You’re whole.”

He closes his eyes. He cannot find the words for her. 

Shiro is saved from having to search by the chirr of an alert on the main control panel. Coran stoops over the panel, his brow furrowing. While Lance covers his ears and Allura covers Shiro’s, he consults the security feed for the main hangar, where all of the ships that are not the lions come and go from the castle. Coran pushes a button to silence the alarm.

“What is it?”

He looks over his shoulder. Specifically, at Allura. In the last couple of months he has started to look at her differently. The way he once looked at her father, asking for an explanation or an order. Some sort of resolution for an impending crisis.

“An unmarked ship just docked with us. It’s probably one of the Blade’s.”

Shiro brushes her hands away, but doesn’t go as far to try to stand up on his own “Is it my brother?”

Coran brings up the feed onto the main screen. All of them watch as the door to the tinted cockpit springs open. Lotor hops out. The fluidity with which he moves is new to Allura- almost offensive. She wants to call out to him that he has forgotten his cane. Lotor leans back into the cockpit and after a brief struggle, reappears with a bundle in his arms. 

“Oh fuck.” says Lance. He leans around Coran and hits the intercoms so his voice rings out across the castle “Bring him to the bridge.”

Lotor looks up in surprise.

“Now!” snaps Lance, then, to Coran “Get a healing pod ready.”

Coran’s face blanches “The main healing pods are out of commission. They were used so much for the last batch of refugees we carried I had to put them offline to recalibrate. If we put Keith in one of those I don’t know what it will do to him, but it won’t heal him.”

Allura pulls Shiro to his feet “That’s fine. There’s the double-berth pod. Lance, relax. There’s another one we can use.”

“Princess, we haven’t turned that bastard on in 10,000 decaphoebs.”

“So? The other healing pods worked right away. This one should do the same.”

Putting Shiro against the communications panel, Allura shoos Lance off of the intercoms. From the various security feeds she can see Lotor has already gotten halfway to the bridge. By Willow does he move fast these days.  
“Change of plans, Lotor. Meet us in the lower level where the storerooms are. There’s a storage closet with a pink door. If you go through to the back of it and press on the wall it’ll open into a bigger room. Take a left-”

Lotor does not need her directions at all. He takes the left on his own and starts down a narrow staircase Allura was about to recommend as a short-cut. After all of these years he still knows his way around the castle. Allura swallows hard. She does not know if she is choking back a sob or a curse. How long has he had to forget? The rumours and Blade intelligence place him in a healing pod of his own at the back of one of Honerva’s forgotten labs, now taken over by Haggar, just steeping in quintessence for almost the same amount of time that Coran and Allura were waiting. But his was faulty.  
According to the Blade the prince’s pod had flooded up to his middle by the time one the interns noticed and, taking a risk, let him out because it seemed he would drown in the liquid quintessence. And Lotor has been running about the universe ever since. Maybe four or five of the Paladins’ years. 

So much has happened to him in that time. He was restored as the prince of the Galra, but now an imperial prince, a figure of fear, authority, inspiring hatred in most of the people that looked at him. His father is unrecognisable to Allura, so the gods only know what Lotor thought when he spilled out of his healing pod and met a man willing to throw him into the rings if Lotor upset too many of his plans. Lotor had to make his own allies. Find his sister generals. Dodge around Haggar and her insidious agenda. Contend with the rising tide of discontent among the common people- the attacks of rebel militias all across the galaxy.  
Voltron, reappearing out of thin air, and the last battle-castle in existence helmed by people who were his family not too long ago.

And somehow he has made the space to remember which way to go in the castle to find the secret healing pod, down to the short-cut through the basement. 

“I don’t think I can move.” Shiro has put his hands over his face again. 

“That’s fine.” 

Without waiting for permission Allura pops him on her back. His weight feels off. Only yesterday they were sparring, so Allura has a recent point of reference. Besides he doesn’t like to be man-handled, which she understands, given what he must have gone through in the way of losing bodily autonomy when he was a Galra prisoner. Today he doesn’t offer so much as a grunt in protest. He surrenders to Allura entirely.

In the interest of saving time, Coran hustles them into a seldom used service elevator that will take them straight to the basement. So seldom-used, in fact, that Lance doesn’t even know what he’s standing in.

“How long have we had this right here?”

“Since the castle was built.”

He glowers at Allura “Why do you have us run through the halls when we need to form Voltron then? We could have been using this puto elevator entire time?”

“Look, I’m not always going to remember every single resource we have on hand, am I? This is war, Lance. I didn’t have time to go about making lists.”

“You do, though! I’ve seen you take inventory a hundred times!”

Lance and Allura quibble back and forth all the way down. Shiro can’t tell them to shut up because he isn’t conscious enough to do so. Coran doesn’t shut them up- he is probably grateful of the noise, distracting him from having to think about the fact that Lotor is back in the castle. They haven’t even had a proper conversation yet, Coran and Lotor. 

Allura isn’t really sure what she and Lance are saying too each other. Anyway, it all stops the moment the elevator dumps them on the lower levels. Lotor is right there, waiting for them. He even remembers where the service elevator is.  
Whatever Allura wants to feel at seeing him again is brushed away when she gets a good look at Keith.

She has seen worse injuries, of course, but rarely on people she loves. When Alfor or Zarkon or one of the other Paladins were laid up in hospital, Coran kept her away from them under the pretence that she’d bother them. She saw Lotor plenty of times post-recovery, but people who underwent normal surgeries and people who have been mauled by battle look very different. Now she understands Coran wanted to keep her far from war as long as he could. Keep it a distant, irritating thing that stole her parents’ time and made Zarkon grumble.   
The first dead body she ever saw was at her mother’s funeral. The private one that happened just before the big interplanetary affair. Allura was a few decaphoebs younger than Pidge. She wasn’t yet tall enough to see over the rim of the tomb, so Coran had to pick her up under the arms when she wanted to kiss her mother’s cold cheek goodbye. At least then her mother had been tidied up. Dressed in the full military uniform of Altea so she was enclosed in stiff pink fabric all the way up to the neck. Allura couldn’t have seen the fatal wounds unless she tore the shirt right off of her mother’s body. Which she seriously considered doing. 

In a way she kind of resents Coran for sheltering her for most of her life. He should have at least allowed Allura to unbutton her mother’s vest and get a good look at the scratches, the bitemarks, the way skin wrinkles when it has been stitched back up, the bruising. 

If he had, then it might be easier to look at Keith. 

Allura genuinely believes he is dead until Lotor speaks up “He’s getting worse. Whatever he uses to breathe, I think there’s something wrong with them.”

“Let me see him.” Lance breezes past her. 

Lotor hands Keith off to him carefully and dashes for the storage closet. For a man who has just been handed his half-dead friend, Lance is remarkably calm. Even though he’s looking at parts of a human’s insides that should never be exposed to the light he is able to walk steadily through the storage closet to the modest little hospital set up behind its false wall. In his place, Allura thinks she would have dropped to her knees and sobbed before she got over the threshold.

Lotor has begun to bring the double-berth healing pod online. 10000 decaphoebs of dust swirl about the air. It’s light in the room, but not because the lights are still working after all this time. Lotor’s hair glows brightly enough that everyone can move about the room and see where they are going. She is fairly certain his hair didn’t used to do that. 

“Why is this separate from the rest of the pods?” asks Lance. If he knows the front of his shirt is sopping with blood he doesn’t care.

“It was a secret. The other healing pods are pretty public. If one of the Paladins were hurt we preferred putting them in a pod in here. Discouraged terror attacks and that.” supplies Allura.

It also encouraged the idea that the Paladins were beings of eternal strength and wisdom. If they did their healing out of sight then the public could assume the Paladins were invincible. The double-berth pod was built so that any two of the Paladins could be put inside at the same time. Allura once saw Coran squeeze Zarkon and the massive Gyrgan in there at the same time. 

“Is it working?”

As if on cue, the pod hums to life. A soft blue beam issues from its centre and traces the circumference of the pod. A self-scan. 

“It’s fully functional.” Lotor beckons to Lance “Here, I’ll help you put him in.”

“Should we leave him in the uniform?”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea to waste time cutting him out of it. He won’t get an infection or anything. Al, is the big one coming in too?”

Her nickname coming out of Lotor’s mouth almost makes her drop Shiro. Why does it shock her so much? Lotor called her Al long, long before Lance ever did. 

Coran takes Shiro from her “I think he had better. He’s drooling blood all over Allura.”

Shiro goes in first. Lance kneels before lowering Keith into the pod. Sensing his brother is nearby, an otherwise insensible Shiro rolls onto his side and wraps an arm around him. Around the wound. Like Shiro is trying to hold his brother together. 

The moment Lance is out of the way Lotor lowers the lid. Together the pair of them only take up about a third of the space. Keith’s injury makes him pathetically small. Shiro does not look much bigger than him- like the shell of some shrivelled animal. The pod seals with the hiss of compressing air. A blue sheen fills the glass up for a moment, then Shiro and Keith are still as sleepers. Not even breathing unless you look very close. 

With a sigh, Lotor leans on the surface of the pod, his hand over Keith’s troubled face “By Willow. That was close.”

Allura narrows her eyes “Lotor, what did you do?”

To her surprise, he laughs in her face “Speak softly to me, sister…it’s been a bit of a trying day. I’ll tell you everything in a moment. But for now, I must do this.”

And with that Lotor sags over the top of the healing pod, dead asleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The gang's all here! Almost. Kolivan is dragging his feet. As is the other Shiro.


	17. “It is nice to know there’s somewhere to bleed, yes.”

Hunk arrives to a castle in chaos. Not the sort of chaos he fears where the place is overrun with imperial drones and druids and Zarkon is on the bridge in the middle of tearing Allura’s throat out, but the chaos he is familiar with from when his mothers and big brother would have a fight. Coran, Allura and Lotor are having a furious whispered argument in the hall outside of the secret room where the double-berth hangs out. Keith and Shiro are completely sacked out in a way that reminds Hunk of the way the family dog would go down after a fight.   
Mister President was a little terrier-shar pei mix that would join in on the louder family arguments by yipping at whoever was being the loudest and turning in circles until the voices quieted down. Hunk isn’t sure if that was anxiety on Mister President’s part, or if he was dense enough to mistake the very familiar sound of human anger for playfulness when it was not directed at him. Either way, Keith and Shiro are totally channelling Hunk’s beloved old family dog. They look relaxed. Keith also looks like somebody went at his armour with a can-opener then tried for his ribs. And Shiro is snoring.

Theoretically the crystal sheeting over the healing pods should be so thick that no sound can leave the pods. Keeps those in attendance around the pod from being distressed if their buddy inside is screaming a little bit before they go into stasis. Either there’s something wrong with the sealing on the double-berth or Shiro is snoring so loudly it’s penetrating sound-proof crystal.   
Hunk knows Shiro has some good lungs on him- he has heard the man bellow Pidge right out of her headphones before, and Pidge once sat through a fire-drill because of those things. Obviously Shiro is going to be ok. Hunk doesn’t understand why his entire face is covered in blood, but Shiro should be fine. 

When Hunk has ascertained a general impression of the chaos downstairs, he goes up to check on Lance. 

The door is locked.

Hunk raps his knuckles on the door “Lanzáro. Let me in.”

A plaintive voice and soft guitar seeps out from under the door. Lance turns the music up by a couple of notches, but Hunk had already recognised it as Sufjan Stevens.

This is bad. Hunk pinches the bridge of his nose “Lance, buddy, I don’t know what happened, but I know you can’t lock yourself up in your bedroom and listen to Sufjan until it goes away. This is war. Shit doesn’t clear itself up.”

Lance turns the volume up until the walls throb gently in time with the ballads. 

Hunk sighs “Oh, do whatever you need to do. Just get your shit together. Love you, Lance.”

“Love you too.” mutters Lance.

“It’s gonna be ok.”

“It’s gonna be war.” Lance shoots back. 

Hunk can’t think of anything to say to that, so he creeps from the door with the vague idea that he should find Pidge and Matt to discuss the results of the experiment. It was an experiment that could have killed them so easily. No matter that the payload was miles and miles away, that Kitty was right behind them to scoop them up and fly out of range in case of disaster- that was only if they got enough warning.   
Hunk was wirelessly interfacing with the payload. Essentially hacking into a spell attached to a hair-trigger switch that might go off at any moment. It was like hacking into a curse-word scrawled on top of the pin of a grenade. He managed it. He and Pidge sweated over the theory and the practical parts together, nearly in tears over the confusing maths and the alien chemistry and on top of all that the extra dimension of magic that seemed to have been added just to prove that God, if She does in fact exist, is cruel and enjoys the suffering of others. 

And then when the moment of truth was on hand Pidge freaked out at the radio. For valid reasons, but Hunk had no idea what was happening at the time. As far as he knew Pidge was just bellowing in his ear. Perhaps trying to sabotage his efforts. That did briefly occur to Hunk- that Pidge had gotten sick of living, suffering, warring, searching for her father, and decided to take Hunk and Matt and a gigantic chunk of planet out with her.   
But it all worked out in the end. Hunk survived. The Holts survived. The Broganes apparently imploded while Hunk was off the castle. They’re kind of fine? Keith looks like he has been through something major. Shiro might have just shut a door on his own face and decided to crawl into the double-berth after his brother. Hunk isn’t sure yet. Hunk really should grab one of his buddies and wring out exactly what happened while he was figuring out how to deactivate weapons that could technically be more destructive than nuclear weapons.

It’s not like Hunk was expecting a celebration when they got back. He wouldn’t have minded a pat on the back. A quick side-hug. A ‘good job Hunk and Pidge, now we can save the world’ sort of thing, but hey, it’s alright, he doesn’t need validation when there are more important things going on like his friends dying slowly. Honestly it makes him a little sick that he is worrying about his own petty need for validation (Petty? Basic? Intrinsic?) while everybody else is in shambles.

Hunk stops outside of Pidge’s door and listens for a moment in silence. She’s crying. He can tell even before he hears her sobbing. Hunk’s brother put his mothers through such a wringer that it got to the point where Hunk could sense tears behind a door before he heard a peep to indicate he was right.  
It’s one of his more obscure and useless special skills. Science, he can harp on about endlessly and make one helluva career out of assuming he survives Voltron, but honestly the ability to smell distress from 20 feet away has probably been more useful to his daily life than his capacity for science.

“…never find him?” Pidge is saying through her tears. 

“We will. Of course we will. We found each other again, didn’t we?”

“But you left clues, Matt! Clues on a fake grave! Dad hasn’t left a single thing behind. It’s like he’s made of fog or some shit- the sun came out and melted him. We’re half-orphans now. Maybe full orphans. Maybe Mama killed herself because as far as she knows her whole family is dead-”

Pidge’s voice is muffled. It sounds like Matt has pulled her into a hug. She begins to sob twice as hard as before. 

With a sigh, Hunk retreats from her door and heads back towards the double-berth. He remembers seeing an outlet there. Keith and Shiro could probably use the company anyway. By the time Hunk has retrieved a laptop from his room and reached the double-berth room, the Alteans and Lotor has finished fighting. Allura storms past him with furious tears in her eyes. She’s muttering something about stubbornness and pride and duplicity- the normal stuff people rage about after they’ve had a fight with their family. Coran is nowhere to be seen which probably means he has made a tactical retreat to the bridge, where he can push buttons and scroll through the map, feeling useful, and not thinking about the terrible straits he and his pseudo-daughter have been caught up in.   
Maybe Coran worries for Lotor as well. Sensitive as Hunk is to the suffering of others he generally has to have it explained to him before he can feel real sympathy. Relating to other peoples’ pain is only easy for him when he can actually relate. It’s a bit overwhelming, now, the amount of people he has to empathise with. 

Hunk doesn’t know what he expected the job would be like when he became one of the legs of the space-messiah, but he didn’t think it was going to be so emotionally draining to champion the cause of so many disenfranchised and abused alien peoples. 

“At least there’s healthcare.” he says aloud, making himself smile. His mum would appreciate the joke.   
His tina not so much because she has so many horror stories about the sort of healthcare that was available to female boxers of colour when she was working the rings. They’d give her gauze, whiskey and a veiled jab about her being a southpaw. 

“It is nice to know there’s somewhere to bleed, yes.” 

Hunk freezes. 

He didn’t even realise Lotor was in here until he spoke up. Lotor sits beside the double-berth with his legs crossed, his head lowered in something that might be exhaustion or the remnants of shame. Hunk considers running. He considers throwing his laptop at Lotor and wrenching the double-berth out of the wall, carrying Shiro and Keith to safety.   
Hunk plugs his laptop into the outlet and sits down on Shiro’s side of the berth.

“No need to be embarrassed. Plenty of people talk to themselves. I’ve often had no one else to speak to.”

Hunk glowers at his laptop “I wonder why.”

“You think I did that to him?” Lotor nods at Keith “Clawed him to shreds, I mean? And that’s why the old man and ‘Lura were so furious with me.”

Why is this guy starting conversation with Hunk? Moreover, why is Hunk responding?  
“Nah. You’d be dead if you’d hurt Keith. I’m not thinking about you at all, in fact, I’m worrying about my work.”

“Ah. The geo-bombs. Haggar was fine-tuning those for years. I wasn’t supposed to know about them, but then Zarkon and Haggar would have very loud fights about whether or not there was room in the budget for such fancy, finnicky technology while the generals and I were only a few rooms away. Couldn’t help but hear, you understand. I’m quite impressed you managed to figure out a way to deactivate them without, you know, just blowing the quiznakkers up.”

“It wasn’t easy.” says Hunk with a bit more venom than he intends “Your buddy Haggar put a magic seal on the trigger. I basically had to hack into magic to figure out how to keep her from destroying half of the galaxy.”

Lotor pulls a face Hunk doesn’t quite know how to interpret. Disgust? Amusement? A repressed sneeze?   
“We’re not buddies.” he says “We’re not even colleagues anymore.”

“Pretty good way to quit your job. Flying into the sun, I mean.”

Lotor’s eyes narrow “Allura’s been telling stories, has she? Never could keep a secret to herself.”

“I’m interested to know how that didn’t kill you. It should have.”

“I should have been dead 10,000 decaphoebs ago, and yet here I am, having a circuitous conversation with you. Will you hit me in the nose if I try to look at what you’re doing?”

Hunk shakes his head. Though he thinks of redacting his promise when Lotor hops on top of the double-berth and leans across it to get a look at what Hunk is doing- obviously the glass won’t break, but does he have to do that? Besides, Hunk isn’t sure Keith’s gay little heart could survive the shock if he woke up to a near-perfect ass hovering inches above his face with the skin-tight Blade uniform adhering to every contour of it. 

Lotor maintains what he thinks is a respectful distance. Humans and Altean-Galra obviously have different ideas of what personal space means, though, because he is pretty much draped about Hunk like the sort of fur wrap you wear to an opera.   
Actually, Hunk thinks, it may be his own little pansexual heart which does not survive this experience. No. No, former enemy. Hunk can hold a grudge like nothing- it doesn’t matter that this guy’s pretty and leaning on him in a way that ensures Hunk can pretty much tell curve-for-curve which parts of Lotor are pressed up against him. Hunk’s not about to trust this guy any time soon. No matter how trustworthy Lotor seems to have proved himself (for example, bringing Keith back to be healed instead of letting him die under Haggar’s witch-slipper), Hunk observes a strict period of suspicion whereby he will under no circumstances trust a person who has wronged him for at least a month since the last incident. This is even if the person has made the overtures of an apology or actually made amends. 

Hunk might outwardly accept the apology and attempt to make things right but on the inside, he is screaming for the person to just try him, just go ahead, see what happens when you mess with a Garret. Not good things, my friend, not good things.  
It’s one of the reasons Lance says they are best friends. Lance claims he made a best friend out of Hunk before Hunk could realise how annoying Lance could be and decide they were enemies. Good thinking, on Lance’s part. 

“What’s this?” Lotor’s breath tickles Hunk’s ear.

“Communication platform,” says Hunk, although what he wants to say is ‘space-Facebook’ “I use it to let the sovereign leaders and rebel units and stuff that we work with what’s going on. I’m sending out instructions on how to remote-defuse the geo-bombs now. Hopefully, when people find they’re sitting on top of one, they’ll be able to solve the problem with this.”

Lotor squints. A hand lands on Hunk’s shoulder, possibly for balance, or possibly because Lotor wants to show off his fantastic manicure. And his nails are truly impressive. Even the blood crusted under the quicks somehow looks glamorous.  
“How on earth do you expect people to repeat this bit of hacking? Even with a manual to help them along this process looks bloody complicated.”

A flush of pride creeps up Hunk’s throat. Thank god he’s too dark-skinned to blush. Hunk bites the inside of his mouth, angry with himself for loving the praise. Especially considering who it has come from.  
“It isn’t as complicated as it looks for somebody who knows their way around technology. Pidge and I managed it fine, and we’re just humans. We’ve probably got less than half the brain space most of the Coalition are working with. If we can do it the rest of the galaxy can do it.”

“It’s still a frightening bit of math you and the little one have produced.”

Mercifully, Lotor leans back. He lets go of Hunk’s shoulder and suddenly Hunk can breathe again. 

“Is her name really Pidge?”

“It’s what we call her, yeah.”

“And you are actually called Hunk?”

Hunk cocks an eyebrow “What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing, I assume, since you’re content to be addressed as ‘Hunk’. It just seems a little…a little rough, in terms of a name. You humans in general don’t seem to be very good at naming each other.”

“That’s totally racist.”

“Species-ist, I think you mean.”

Hunk hides a smile by pretending to scratch his nose “Just so you know, ‘Lotor’ sounds stupid to us. We’ve been calling you everything but ‘Lotor’.”

He can feel the prince’s eyes move off of him. Lotor slides from the double-berth and peers into Keith’s face for a sign of movement “I know. I could hear it well when Keith talked to you. How long have he and the other one been a couple?”

Hunk’s fingers freeze on the keys “Him and Lance?”

“The skinny one with the amazing complexion, yes. His name is Lance? I really must remember which of you is which.”

“They’re not a couple.” sputters Hunk “They totally should be, I think, but they’re not- not at all.”

“Ah,” Lotor straightens up “Well then, I suppose kissing is a platonic ritual amongst humans.”

Hunk shoots a glance at Keith, unconscious and innocent with a bit of bloody drool running down his chin. What has that boy been up to? As soon as Lance is out of Sufjan Steven albums to drown his pain Hunk is gonna break his door in and demand that he dish. 

Lotor is saved from having to further explain what he has seen when Shiro suddenly sits up in the berth. Or tries to. What ends up happening is Shiro whacks his forehead squarely on the crystal pod over him with a noise like a watermelon bouncing off the hood of a car.

Shiro swears in Korean and Japanese, and Hunk understands far more of it than he ever expected to be able to.

Lotor retreats into the shadows again. A good idea, probably, because Shiro might mistake him for the cause of his injury and try to kill him. 

Hunk gets up on his knees and waves down to Shiro “Feeling better?”

Shiro looks at his hands. Gloves of blood “I think so. What the hell happened to me?”

“I think you picked Lance up by the throat. Then threw him. Then threw Allura.”

The horror on Shiro’s face dispels any fears Hunk entertained that Shiro might have actually meant to do it. Now the real question comes out; what in the hell possessed Shiro to act like that?

“Are you sure?”

“I wasn’t on the ship when it happened, but yeah.”

Shiro rubs the red spot on his forehead where he smacked the crystal “Are they ok?”

“They’re fine. More worried about you, I think. It’s upset Lance a bit just so you know.”

“Oh no,” Shiro flicks a clot of blood off the end of his forefinger “Is he shut up in his room with Sufjan Stevens playing?”

“Yep. When I was there it was ‘Feel the Illinois’ at full blast.”

Shiro groans “Ah shit. I better go talk to him. Um, you wanna come with? And let me out of here?”

“I don’t know how to let you out. I’ve never seen this thing before.”

“I can let him out.” Lotor makes his way over to the double-berth and stoops on the far-side. A control panel springs from its walls where before there were no seams. 

“Who was that?” 

The crystal panel slides to the side. Shiro gets out quickly so as not to disrupt Keith’s healing process and pushes the lid down with both hands. He leaves the faint imprint of his hands in blood.

Shiro glares down at Lotor “Wanna tell me what happened to my brother?”

Lotor stands. They are almost the same height. Hunk scoots backwards, wondering if there is a way to drag the double-berth out of their way if they decide to throw down.

“We had to fight our way off the ship where the manifest was.”

Shiro rubs the touches of his head as if he expects to find a weeping wound “Looks like my brother took most of the damage-”

There is a sound like a tin can being tossed into a blender. The castle shakes so hard Shiro has to grab Lotor by the arm to keep from falling on his face. Hunk snaps his laptop shut as the lights dim and a klaxon begins to sound.

“Something hit us through the shields.” 

Shiro nods “You, Prince Lootnoot or whatever, stay with my brother.”

Lotor tries to protest “I’m in much better condition to fight than you are.”

“Yeah well I don’t trust you to actually fight on our side. And if you do something to Keith- something more than you’ve already done, I’m gonna rip out the Galra equivalent of your spine out of the Galra equivalent of your urethra. Got it?”

“Got it.” says Lotor solemnly “You might want to take the service lift.”

The service lift dumps them out onto the bridge in time to see a missile racing towards the bridge’s windshield. Allura is hammering the button which usually controls the shielding to no avail. Just when it has occurred to Hunk that he might be about to die, Greenbean zooms across the windshield and bats the missile to the side. It explodes seconds later just to their left.

“What is wrong with this damn shield?” Allura hammers her fist into the control panel a couple more times “Hunk! What’s going on?”

He rushes to her side “Let me look.”

The ship keeps coming. Straight on like it’s going to ram them- which it is, Hunk realises, as some boosters kick in with a flare of fire out of the back of the other ship. Its pilot fully intends to ram the long, sharp prow of their ship right into the bridge of the Castle of Lions.   
Hunk can also see the control panel for the shields has been tampered with. Not skilfully either. It looks like somebody went at it with a screwdriver and a bad temper. He can’t see how Allura missed this. 

“It’s shot!” 

Allura is bringing the weapons system online “What?”

Hunk peels the casing off of the panel and is horrified by the mess of wires inside, spraying sparks and bleeding oil “Allura, this has been full-on sabotaged!”

Outside Greenbean has managed to get her claws into the hull of the ship and is clawing away busily at it. But she cannot shake it from its course.

“Allura! The teludav!” shouts Coran, appearing from the hallway with Lance. 

But Lotor is already there. He places his palms on the well-worn pads, which glow in response to him just as Hunk has seen them respond to Allura. A pair of triangular markings suddenly flicker into being underneath Lotor’s wild eyes. The ship is sucked backwards into the familiar tunnel of white light. Seeing what is happening, Greenbean springs from the ship and puts on a burst of insane speed that only a Voltron Lion could manage, sinking a claw into the hull of the ship so as not to be lost. 

As the castle winks out of the plane of space, the other ship has gotten just close enough that Hunk can see the pilot of the other ship. Haggar. Her mouth is open in a howl as Voltron slips out of her grasp.

Seconds later the castle re-materialises in the shadow of a moon. The teludav powers down. Lotor lets go of the pads with a grunt of effort and sits down heavily.

“What?” he looks pleased with himself “Is there something on my face?”


End file.
